Glad to see that the Google boys were up late last night near Shoreline Amphitheatre; maybe they're really working on this.
Because filtering results is not my action item. I should not have to append jargon to filter out pseudo-facts disguised as advertising. And while programmers and data base designers no doubt can contrive filters on the fly to get better results, other users are much less capable of outsmarting professional search engine optimizer experts. It's not a fair fight; these SEO guys are well-paid and very competent at spamming Google's index.They're a lot better than my wife, my mother-in-law, my sister-in-law, and to be just, two out of three of my brothers-in-law. All of these are doomed to crappy results when they search for health-related questions, fuel-efficient cars, recipes, or any of a thousand everyday interests.
Bad results not only frustrate lay users. They also screw up many academics in non-technical fields. For example, a literary scholar searching for "The Red Badge of Courage" + "text" will turn up the same Gutenberg.org file (and the same typos) under a different commercial guises in six of the first ten results. Of the remainder, two will be puerile cheatsheets from the likes of gradesaver.com. If he's patient, he will find a single worthwhile link--a scholarly edition from the University of Virginia.
By the way, in the unlikely event that anyone here is searching for serious results for sex research, "Orgasm" -"cumming" works better than "Orgasm"+"coming."
But, to repeat, twisting my brain around to construct a fruitful search for information about such topics as physiology, politics, economics, or philosophy is not my job. Hint to Google: quit working so hard and just buy Duck Duck Go.
In "The Book Bag," Somerset Maugham describes traveling with a misshapen bag of books so large that it "made strong porters quail [and] looked like a humpbacked gnome somewhat the worse for liquor."
Except for Penguin's graciousness in allowing the full preview to be visible, this volume of Maugham's great collection of stories would be one of innumerable books unavailable in electronic form either free OR for sale.
These fools have somehow stumbled their way into ~$11 billion in annual revenue by letting people hang out and use computers. But, any day now, one of those Indies that knows more about running coffeehouses is going to blow them away. Caribou Coffee, with 451 stores, offers much better coffee than that unpopular junk sold in Starbucks' 11,000 locations.
It's really hard to know why anyone would think of emulating a business model as clearly as unsuccessful as Starbucks:
They have no right to a union, no right to speak, no right to demand respect from students. Everybody except teachers knows exactly how to teach just as those who use computers or cars know everything there is about how to design and build them. Education is a mess because of worthless, lowlife teachers and despite the heroic efforts of principals, administrators, parents, taxpayers, and former students. All the smart people on Slashdot taught themselves everything they know, and, as former students, are experts not only at being students but also on being teachers. Teachers should be fed to the hogs, or better still, the students. Just imagine how much money it would save if students taught themselves and ate ground teacher instead of tax-payer supported lunchmeat.
I don't work for a school district, or, of course, I would be suspended and muzzled for this post. Quite right, too.
The new Apple under Jobs has been built on a PR platform of "loose lips sink ships." Back in the day, every product manager thought he was running Apple and was talking out of the corner of his mouth to any trade reporter he could find to spin his own career-advancing schemes. By the time Apple announced new products, the world was bored.
Of course they have a succession plan, and that includes secrecy until the "launch."
I saw an interesting feature story about presidential son Gamal Mubarak's flight to his $14.3 million townhouse in London. He and his trophy wife, 20 years his junior, left in a private jet with 100 suitcases. There was also a well-designed set of bullet points about why the uprising began. I couldn't find it again, but it said, for example, that the number of children under five suffering from malnutrition has grown by 300% in about five years. Not surprising in a place where the average worker makes three cents an hour for a 48-hour work week.
The lead story on Egypt has some spectacular photos of the uprising, but if there is a breaking news story to go with them, I couldn't find it.
The production values are really sensational. News Corp gave somebody a blank check to build it.
I detected no flavor of a Fox or Post slant. I saw a pop newspaper that is a bit of a cross between USA Today and People Magazine. The interface is not at all weblike, but it may be very popular with a mass audience. Since mass audiences are meat and drink to newspapers and magazines, The Daily may be a huge success. The only ad I noticed was one from Verizon.
I don't know if the costs of this enterprise can be recovered with "news stand" sales of ninety-nine cents a day or whatever they plan to charge. I'll certainly have to see a lot more hard news before I sign up for the paid version.
While I have no desire to line Murdoch's pockets, I very much hope The Daily will be sufficiently profitable to spawn imitators. Many much more reputable publishers than he are on the ropes, and if he points the way to their survival, so much the better for readers and the body politic.
Not all 911 calls are about life-threatening emergencies. And that homicides are more serious than armed robberies is not offered as an excuse for failing to investigate both expeditiously. It would be nice if the computer industry would stop excusing itself on the grounds of terminal uniqueness. There are a great many laws and procedures in the "real" world that can and should be adopted by the computer world without rethinking or reinvention.
Rajnovic's book seems to be an honest attempt to help IT security get up to well-established standards.
Cheers to Mozilla for trying to start this conversation outside the narrow walls of Slashdot. The proposed solution may be ineffective or even have adverse unintended consequences, but the problem is real. Internet tracking is beyond intrusive; it's dangerous. The same techniques used for arguably legitimate purposes by advertisers can (and are) used by malware authors.
Most web users, simply aren't aware of the potential danger of simply pointing and clicking. Market research and advertising are essential to capitalism; they help buyers and sellers find one another. But there must be limits. If television advertisers could peer back at us in our living rooms and measure the pupils of our eyes, I suspect there would be an outcry loud enough for end-users to hear.
Well, victims "should" leave retaliation to law enforcement. But when there is no answer to the question, "What law enforcement?" victims "will" retaliate whether they "should" or not.
I'm going to pay with my iPad today--and then see if I do anything stupider during the remainder of January than carry a 1.5 pound device through the checkout line instead of a 1/64th ounce Starbucks card.
California's laws often lead the way simply because it's hard to do anything nationally or internationally without becoming subject to its regulations and laws. How easy is it to spew out spam without some of it going to California email addresses? Not very, I should think.
Isn't this a great opportunity to push Linux into consumer market? I am an end-user who loves Linux--in theory--but I've never tried to use it. A larger base of Linux users is surely good news for developers. If this UK thing works out, I'll bet America will follow. It's a model Obama can push through on his own through executive order without facing knee-jerk GOP opposition.
Good point. But why not Friday afternoon and use the whole holiday weekend to spin backwards.
Obviously, I know nothing. He may come pole-vaulting back onto the stage, tanned and rested. I sure as hell don't want to be right about a fatal illness.
I am looking back as far as 1928. In IBM's early days -- which are the best comparison to those of Apple's current comparative youth --customer service was job one.
And by your own account, it's a huge profit center.
Yes, in the past five years, esp. since Lenova, there has been a big surge in customer complaints.
As I said, I've been an Apple booster for years and cut my teeth on the "Apple vs. IBM" wars. I've no reason to praise IBM except for the facts.
I think he's sicker than sick. To bail before the shareholder's meeting --where he has performed both effectively and with great personal gusto--tells me that he is simply unable to do it.
I am an Apple fanboy of 30+ years duration. I am saddened by this development and applaud Fake Steve Jobs for his tact and judgment in this case. The company itself, however, may well prosper under new leadership as Apple continues to morph into an IBM-style megacorporation focused on efficiency and customer service. Their retail stores have a huge upside for growth and widespread consumer acceptance will no doubt drive more corporate IT acceptance as users demand it.
I feel that this observation about Jobs's health and imminent departure, while perhaps in poor taste, needs to acknowledged as well
Ashland is indeed what's sometimes called a "country club prison," described by the Bureau of Prisons as "dormitory style" without fences."
I think the "300 miles from home" observation is misplaced. Prison is never fun, but better to do your time with white collar criminals than with habitual sadists, rapists, and murderers who've spent most of their lives behind walls and gun towers. I think the BOP cut him a huss.
Even so, the sentence was disproportionate for young first-time offender. Its only purpose is an attempt to deter computer crime. If it does that, then the young jailbird will be a martyr to a good cause.
I took one look at Duck Duck Go and changed my default search engine. I don't know how long it will last, but the Duck looks like the early Google that made me dump Alta Vista like so much shit. Try searching for anything with "review" in it and compare to Google's results.
You could call this a slashvertisement except, for now at least, Duck Duck Go isn't selling anything, not even ads much less your privacy.
My iPad weighs too much. As a competitor to print, it's just not there yet. In Starbucks, they sell the real New York Times. My iPad looks at me and asks, "do you think she's prettier than I am?"
Why not make suspects retake a similar test under videotaped supervision. If they can duplicate their results, good on them. Harder to do with a one-to-one proctor-student ratio.
As owner of a small business, I am responsible for our IT. I am only 9% competent, and that's giving myself all the best of it. Still, I have to do it because there is neither anyone else available, nor can we afford to hire anyone. I glean what I am able to understand from slashdot.
Thank you, LostOne, for your generosity of spirit and helpfulness. And thank you, wiedzmin, for having the guts to ask this bunch for help. If you accept this relatively easy advice, your users will thank you too.
And to those of you here who claim "half a brain": please remember that you yourselves may someday need to do something (legal, financial, educational, even technical) for which you are less than half competent. Yes, you have achieved a "win" in humilating a sincere poster, but it's the cheap victory enjoyed only by the pusillanimous.
The enforcement of consumer products, enabling resolutions (to enforce existing law), and the enforcement of anti-trust law all belong to the White House--Tea Party be damned.
O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous.
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man’s life’s as cheap as beast’s.
Slashdot Mirror
Glad to see that the Google boys were up late last night near Shoreline Amphitheatre; maybe they're really working on this.
Because filtering results is not my action item. I should not have to append jargon to filter out pseudo-facts disguised as advertising. And while programmers and data base designers no doubt can contrive filters on the fly to get better results, other users are much less capable of outsmarting professional search engine optimizer experts. It's not a fair fight; these SEO guys are well-paid and very competent at spamming Google's index.They're a lot better than my wife, my mother-in-law, my sister-in-law, and to be just, two out of three of my brothers-in-law. All of these are doomed to crappy results when they search for health-related questions, fuel-efficient cars, recipes, or any of a thousand everyday interests.
Bad results not only frustrate lay users. They also screw up many academics in non-technical fields. For example, a literary scholar searching for "The Red Badge of Courage" + "text" will turn up the same Gutenberg.org file (and the same typos) under a different commercial guises in six of the first ten results. Of the remainder, two will be puerile cheatsheets from the likes of gradesaver.com. If he's patient, he will find a single worthwhile link--a scholarly edition from the University of Virginia.
By the way, in the unlikely event that anyone here is searching for serious results for sex research, "Orgasm" -"cumming" works better than "Orgasm"+"coming."
But, to repeat, twisting my brain around to construct a fruitful search for information about such topics as physiology, politics, economics, or philosophy is not my job. Hint to Google: quit working so hard and just buy Duck Duck Go.
In "The Book Bag," Somerset Maugham describes traveling with a misshapen bag of books so large that it "made strong porters quail [and] looked like a humpbacked gnome somewhat the worse for liquor."
This 78-year-old story is not yet in the public domain, nor is it available on iBooks or Kindle. You can read it on Google Books, however.
http://www.google.com/webhp?q=maugham+%22the+book+bag%22&hl=en&tab=pw#q=maugham+%22the+book+bag%22&hl=en&safe=off&site=webhp&prmd=ivns&ei=jZxZTbirMoSesQOAouibDA&start=20&sa=N&fp=1f4964f2685564e2
Except for Penguin's graciousness in allowing the full preview to be visible, this volume of Maugham's great collection of stories would be one of innumerable books unavailable in electronic form either free OR for sale.
These fools have somehow stumbled their way into ~$11 billion in annual revenue by letting people hang out and use computers. But, any day now, one of those Indies that knows more about running coffeehouses is going to blow them away. Caribou Coffee, with 451 stores, offers much better coffee than that unpopular junk sold in Starbucks' 11,000 locations.
It's really hard to know why anyone would think of emulating a business model as clearly as unsuccessful as Starbucks:
http://www.wikinvest.com/stock/Starbucks_(SBUX)
So take your Kindle and shove it where the sun don't shine, partner. We don't need your kind around here.
The FCC is going to redirect $8 billion already in hand from POTS to broadband. In addition to a dictionary, try cracking open a newspaper.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/08/idUSN0828392120110208
They have no right to a union, no right to speak, no right to demand respect from students. Everybody except teachers knows exactly how to teach just as those who use computers or cars know everything there is about how to design and build them. Education is a mess because of worthless, lowlife teachers and despite the heroic efforts of principals, administrators, parents, taxpayers, and former students. All the smart people on Slashdot taught themselves everything they know, and, as former students, are experts not only at being students but also on being teachers. Teachers should be fed to the hogs, or better still, the students. Just imagine how much money it would save if students taught themselves and ate ground teacher instead of tax-payer supported lunchmeat.
I don't work for a school district, or, of course, I would be suspended and muzzled for this post. Quite right, too.
The new Apple under Jobs has been built on a PR platform of "loose lips sink ships." Back in the day, every product manager thought he was running Apple and was talking out of the corner of his mouth to any trade reporter he could find to spin his own career-advancing schemes. By the time Apple announced new products, the world was bored.
Of course they have a succession plan, and that includes secrecy until the "launch."
I saw an interesting feature story about presidential son Gamal Mubarak's flight to his $14.3 million townhouse in London. He and his trophy wife, 20 years his junior, left in a private jet with 100 suitcases. There was also a well-designed set of bullet points about why the uprising began. I couldn't find it again, but it said, for example, that the number of children under five suffering from malnutrition has grown by 300% in about five years. Not surprising in a place where the average worker makes three cents an hour for a 48-hour work week.
The lead story on Egypt has some spectacular photos of the uprising, but if there is a breaking news story to go with them, I couldn't find it.
The production values are really sensational. News Corp gave somebody a blank check to build it.
I detected no flavor of a Fox or Post slant. I saw a pop newspaper that is a bit of a cross between USA Today and People Magazine. The interface is not at all weblike, but it may be very popular with a mass audience. Since mass audiences are meat and drink to newspapers and magazines, The Daily may be a huge success. The only ad I noticed was one from Verizon.
I don't know if the costs of this enterprise can be recovered with "news stand" sales of ninety-nine cents a day or whatever they plan to charge. I'll certainly have to see a lot more hard news before I sign up for the paid version.
While I have no desire to line Murdoch's pockets, I very much hope The Daily will be sufficiently profitable to spawn imitators. Many much more reputable publishers than he are on the ropes, and if he points the way to their survival, so much the better for readers and the body politic.
Brought down the Soviet Union.
Not all 911 calls are about life-threatening emergencies. And that homicides are more serious than armed robberies is not offered as an excuse for failing to investigate both expeditiously. It would be nice if the computer industry would stop excusing itself on the grounds of terminal uniqueness. There are a great many laws and procedures in the "real" world that can and should be adopted by the computer world without rethinking or reinvention.
Rajnovic's book seems to be an honest attempt to help IT security get up to well-established standards.
Cheers to Mozilla for trying to start this conversation outside the narrow walls of Slashdot. The proposed solution may be ineffective or even have adverse unintended consequences, but the problem is real. Internet tracking is beyond intrusive; it's dangerous. The same techniques used for arguably legitimate purposes by advertisers can (and are) used by malware authors.
Most web users, simply aren't aware of the potential danger of simply pointing and clicking. Market research and advertising are essential to capitalism; they help buyers and sellers find one another. But there must be limits. If television advertisers could peer back at us in our living rooms and measure the pupils of our eyes, I suspect there would be an outcry loud enough for end-users to hear.
Well, victims "should" leave retaliation to law enforcement. But when there is no answer to the question, "What law enforcement?" victims "will" retaliate whether they "should" or not.
I'm going to pay with my iPad today--and then see if I do anything stupider during the remainder of January than carry a 1.5 pound device through the checkout line instead of a 1/64th ounce Starbucks card.
California's laws often lead the way simply because it's hard to do anything nationally or internationally without becoming subject to its regulations and laws. How easy is it to spew out spam without some of it going to California email addresses? Not very, I should think.
Isn't this a great opportunity to push Linux into consumer market? I am an end-user who loves Linux--in theory--but I've never tried to use it. A larger base of Linux users is surely good news for developers. If this UK thing works out, I'll bet America will follow. It's a model Obama can push through on his own through executive order without facing knee-jerk GOP opposition.
Good point. But why not Friday afternoon and use the whole holiday weekend to spin backwards. Obviously, I know nothing. He may come pole-vaulting back onto the stage, tanned and rested. I sure as hell don't want to be right about a fatal illness.
And by your own account, it's a huge profit center.
Yes, in the past five years, esp. since Lenova, there has been a big surge in customer complaints.
As I said, I've been an Apple booster for years and cut my teeth on the "Apple vs. IBM" wars. I've no reason to praise IBM except for the facts.
I am an Apple fanboy of 30+ years duration. I am saddened by this development and applaud Fake Steve Jobs for his tact and judgment in this case. The company itself, however, may well prosper under new leadership as Apple continues to morph into an IBM-style megacorporation focused on efficiency and customer service. Their retail stores have a huge upside for growth and widespread consumer acceptance will no doubt drive more corporate IT acceptance as users demand it.
I feel that this observation about Jobs's health and imminent departure, while perhaps in poor taste, needs to acknowledged as well
I think the "300 miles from home" observation is misplaced. Prison is never fun, but better to do your time with white collar criminals than with habitual sadists, rapists, and murderers who've spent most of their lives behind walls and gun towers. I think the BOP cut him a huss.
Even so, the sentence was disproportionate for young first-time offender. Its only purpose is an attempt to deter computer crime. If it does that, then the young jailbird will be a martyr to a good cause.
I took one look at Duck Duck Go and changed my default search engine. I don't know how long it will last, but the Duck looks like the early Google that made me dump Alta Vista like so much shit. Try searching for anything with "review" in it and compare to Google's results. You could call this a slashvertisement except, for now at least, Duck Duck Go isn't selling anything, not even ads much less your privacy.
Uh, of course not, dear.
Why not make suspects retake a similar test under videotaped supervision. If they can duplicate their results, good on them. Harder to do with a one-to-one proctor-student ratio.
Thank you, LostOne, for your generosity of spirit and helpfulness. And thank you, wiedzmin, for having the guts to ask this bunch for help. If you accept this relatively easy advice, your users will thank you too.
And to those of you here who claim "half a brain": please remember that you yourselves may someday need to do something (legal, financial, educational, even technical) for which you are less than half competent. Yes, you have achieved a "win" in humilating a sincere poster, but it's the cheap victory enjoyed only by the pusillanimous.
The enforcement of consumer products, enabling resolutions (to enforce existing law), and the enforcement of anti-trust law all belong to the White House--Tea Party be damned.
O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous.
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man’s life’s as cheap as beast’s.
eom