It's not as though supreme court justices need to be reelected every few years. Once they're in they're pretty much in for as long as they want to be. So, unless the record companies are remodeling their houses or sending personal 'gifts' for the holidays, I see it as less likely than usual that this a case of corruption. Now, the actual laws that the justices are interpreting... there you have a point.
While it's no indication that they can be bought, fact is people are still greedy. And at $200k-$230K (roughly), there's plenty of buying room for corporate interests to exploit - assuming there are greedy enough people on the SC. Does it mean it happens? No. Does it mean it doesn't? No. Does it mean it's possible? Hell yeah.
People making far more have been bribed... I'd suspect the possibility of buying/bribing someone who's locked into a job for life is probably at least a little higher than bribing someone who's "going somewhere" and has the potential to advance in some fashion.
"This provision was adopted in 1988, well before digital music files became available on the Internet"
So in other words "We get to bend the law to suit our corporate overlord's desires."
LoL, while I think your modding (so far) is warranted, I find it humorous that the first poster pretty much said the same thing but was modded troll. I think you're both probably right (as some other recent USSC cases have proven), and hopefully the AC will earn some better moderation for a probably accurate first post - heck, the attempt at an on topic first post alone should warrant a + mod of some sort (rarity that it is).;-)
Nope, he's right, you're an idiot. The MS products that are on top, largely are there due to anti-competitive/illegal practices where they were found to be in violation of the law (and found guilty in multiple court cases). But by then, the damage was done. The only product group that does not fit into that category is the xBox/xBox360 line. EVERY other product Microsoft has fits it.
Windows 95/NT-> squashed competition (Novell, OS/2, SunOS/Solaris, numerous others) with numerous anti-competitive acts
DOS -> added code to Win3.x to report unwarranted errors if non-MSDOS used... or code (in some versions) that would prevent Windows from running at all
Early Windows (1.x/2.x)->DeskView and numerous others killed in similar tactics
Disk Compression -> Stole code from Stac Electronics
Office -> created "compatibility issues" in the final release of Win95 (that weren't in the earlier betas) with WordPerfect/Lotus and others.
Internet Explorer -> that's been covered ad-infinitum here, so I wont even get into it.
Windows Phone -> trying to force licensing agreements on the likes of HTC, Motorola and others for non WP7 phones (ie: Android).
Linux -> threatening lawsuits over 200+ patents that Microsoft claims they own that Linux et al are infringing on (umm... which ones?)
Should I go on? Maybe I am getting senile, but I cannot think of a single product that won on merits besides the xBox line of consoles and games.
Guess that either (a) makes you an idiot, or (b) makes you Steve Balmer or one of his media guys trying to keep your job. So, which is it? (a) or (b)
when your shit stinks, focus attention on someone else.
It's more than just that. There was a time when declarations like this from Microsoft would actually garner them more business and fulfill their "prophecies" of such. It seems some at Microsoft still think they have that pull, but reality says such efforts by them are largely far less effective than back in the 90's when it used to work. It's all part and parcel to their extravagant claims that they dont/wont cite figures for, and claims of things lacking on Google's end that have already existed for ages.
Nor does it seem he's got much of any idea what cloud computing is anyway... he compares it to their very botched acquisition of Hotmail in 1997 (err... 1998? Nope... 1997 guy!). I was there (UUNet*) when that acquisition completed. In some ways, their actions then were very much like these current ones. They were deep into extolling the virtues of Windows NT Server, started gaining some marketshare, and got lambasted for not using their own product for Hotmail (as well as being lambasted for all the engineers there who were still running OS/2). They switched Hotmail to Windows, with a massive increase in machines (hundredfold, if memory serves), and still had massive issues with their setup not scaling. Sadly, them extolling how much better they were than the competition, even in light of the reality of their own problems with their own platform handling such traffic, worked pretty well, and Windows Server continued to make inroads.
This is more of the same... claim the (very premature) death of a competitor, the "far better" features of your own product, talk about your competitor's privacy issues when they are willing (and have, numerous times) to sell your data to anyone who's a "Business Partner" and on and on. Nothing new... except this time (as with similar cases recently) it's not working the way it did in the past.
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*For those who don't know or didnt remember, "we" at UUNet actually provided much of the services for MSN... backbone, dialup, routing, and many others (and AOL for that matter... AlterDial was actually ours too). Some who remember that day and age may also remember that there were a few non-dedicated numbers (our overflow numbers) shared by UUNet, AOL and MSN... the logins would determine how we routed them and what service we presented. That's how a few "outsiders" started making the connection between it all.
I mean, it'd be stupid if (say) you google something on Bing and you don't get the Microsoft solution first. I think it'd be weird if you look up "Shopping" and google shopping is at the bottom.
But what used to happen when you first turn on a Windows PC was Internet Explorer as your only browser option - is that not the same thing?
They got rapped over being too dominant within their field - as is Google.
Uh, what? Did you mean "HAPPENS" instead of "happened"?
That still happens (present tense) and when you fire up IE, you get pushed towards Bing!
And who gets to decide that, the competition or a neutral party?
A few billion neutral third parties have said that they like Google's appraisal just fine. If their results weren't so in line with what people want and expect, users would have gone with a different search engine.
That's the way things used to work, but not anymore. In the past, you had to go out and find a search engine. I remember we'd type in hotbot.com or Lycos, or AltaVista, and whatever else we could find and just see which one gave us more of what we were looking for. And at some point, Google was good enough that it became popular like this. But now that they've become dominant, they want to make sure nobody else wins the same way Google did. We are past the time where people go out and find their search engine. We are at a time where Google pays to be included in your web browser, on your desktop, in your phone, and in your workplace. Nobody even asks how to find what they're looking for, or ever gets given a list of addresses for search engines. And no, a dropdown list that nobody is aware of does not count as being given a list of search engine addresses.
To summarize, we're not all using Google because we evaluated all of our options and found them to be the best. We're all using Google because it was shoved down our throats and we have no idea there are other options out there.
Ummm... wake up and visit the Internet. Really. Most people run Windows. Most people use Idiotic Explorer. Most people's default search engine is (or suggested as) BING (since most people use Idiotic Explorer)! Most people STILL end up using Google regardless. And that's not even taking into account that many IE typos, mistakes, URL bar entries or uses of Yahoo (and other sites) actually counts towards Bing usage. Yet still, with not just that choice, but the fact that Bing is pushed on to a bunch of people, people still choose to change to Google.
It's not (as you state or imply) a matter of lack of choices or lack of knowledge of other search engine choices or market dominance due to such lacks. Instead, it's many people CHOOSING to change their default search engine in IE from Bing to Google. And MANY people who have installed AVG choosing to use Google instead of Yahoo (BING) as AVG tries to get them to do.
Dont confuse lack of choices with users choosing Google over Bing, Yahoo, AOL Search, etc.
Yes, I also have a feeling they have a clear conscience. As to the reason their own services are ranked high? Of all, surely Google knows how to optimize their pages for Googles page ranking algorithms!
If they really wanted to "do no evil" they would have a clean room team implement the SEO for their own services using only publicly published information. After all using some secret way to get to the top of the list has the same affect as building in a bias for your site.
I know most people don't RTFA, but I'd suggest you do... just this once. Let me spell out the highlights for you.
(1) Foundem simply copies much of it's content from other sources. EVERY webmaster worth his keyboard (even if they don't own a 24 year old IBM Model M like me) knows that's a sure-fire way of DECREASING your ranking. I've known that for YEARS.
(2) The other complainant is a French Search Engine... honestly, do you think a relevant listing would be to return a list of other search engines where you could re-do your search? Think about it... if you googled "cars", would you expect to see a link to Bing to then "Bing" cars?
While what you suggest may be good in theory and even in practice, it's totally unrelated to the case at hand. SOOOOOO drastically unrelated (since your suggestion should in NO way change those two companies' rankings) that you actually should have earned a "-1 Off Topic" mod. Fortunately, virtually no one RTFA. This just happens to be the week (I pick 4 weeks a year) that I am spending the time to RTFA
These dumped extensions can be disabled and uninstalled only from a root account. If you are using a lower privilege account for day to day ops, the uninstall button is grayed out. These extensions are assumed to be installed for "all users" and one low privileged user would/should not be able to take them out. It is a pain to log out, and log in as superuser just to disable one extension that some corporate creep decides to shove on my machine.
Not quite true. Microsoft has disabled the uninstall option for ClickOnce (something since resolved) regardless of account permissions.
Even after that, I've noticed (during a scan with ComboFix) that even after UNINSTALLING.NET CrapOnce stuff, there's a hidden key located on the system still. Is the plugin simply being hidden from the plugins tool in Firefox, or is the key still in Firefox for a different reason?
Considering I was running ComboFix on this machine because of a drive-by exploit that targets.NET/ClickOnce, I'm "not sure" but I have my suspicions. Which brings up the question, "Can a plugin uninstall be faked and the plugin status be hidden from Firefox (whilst the plugin is actually still active)?"
That aside, back to the point at hand: plugin manufacturers can disable plugin uninstallation, regardless of account privileges.
I bet you a bunch from/. have been now... and I wonder how long the DDoS-like scenario lives on because of the Slashdot Effect. Which also makes me wonder if anyone has ever done a study on the DoubleDDoS attack... DDoS some big company, then post the news to Slashdot when your efforts either (a) start to slow down or (b) are being countered... all so it can start all over again with the help of all of us.... I mean you guys... (heck, I never RTFA or click the links).
I'm happy to hear you won't read the mails. I take your word for this, ISP's, because you're trustworthy!
Thanks for giving me your word, and only reading other parts of my surfing habits!
They... refrain from reading the emails... I wonder if their software is under such restrictions.
Oh!!!! But they offered free adware software in the past... which would simply allow them to collect even more information (like all your offline information). Neato!
How about this then: Lets let Ma Bell listen to your phone calls using "deep packet inspection" so they can serve you up advertising. Both are communications channels.
I didn't say it was right (though, AFAIR, Ma Bell already does that - sans the advertising part). I just said you made a very bad analogy, and that there are no laws that apply to prevent such from occurring, unlike (due to the differences in your analogy) the stuff you used in your renter's analogy.
So, again, I fully think this sucks, and should not happen. I was just pointing out that sadly, there is nothing to prohibit it that I can find, as long as the TOS allows it. I can't think of an analogy that fits, since I can't find a legal basis for this to be prohibited... but then again, I am not a lawyer; maybe there is one someplace.
Where one lives is governed my a different set of rules because the circumstances are entirely different. Physical objects, expectation of being able to be totally naked without being spied on (ie: shower, bedroom, or anywhere else simply for the hell of it).
Also, housing is deemed for many legal purposes, as your own while it is being rented. You don't buy (in any legal sense) the Internet when you get a connection.
Also, one chooses what they put online, or what they do online. Which is far different from the expectation of what one will have in their house/apartment.
Totally different than the Internet. Totally bad analogy that doesnt match on any criteria.
Actually, YOU should read YOUR TOS so you can see there are a large number of things that the ISPs can do, but haven't been doing up until this point. Much like how a certain OS manufacturer used to have a buncha services that the TOS stated they could use to sell anything you uploaded... and then later added an option in their picture service to do just that...
Most people never read the fine print in their TOS. I have.
Most people never stop long enough to try to determine what the term "business partner" covers... I have. In most companies' definition, it includes anyone who pays them.
Most of the people who actually do read a TOS, never stop to think about what the open ended phrases and "up to" phrases mean. I'm not one of those people either.
Heck, I've seen various usage agreements and TOS' that allow the company to do just slightly above nothing in offering you a service. Then it becomes a battle of "reasonable expectations" in what can be a costly court case.
Ummm, thanks for the Funny mod, but really, Alex and I have known each other for years now. We've worked together on Star Trek Phase 2. Check out his work... pretty talented guy.
Another (also wild) guess: your application is using the database as a dumb data store, pulling rows one by one from the DB, processing them individually in the application server. That's inevitably going to be very slow.
No, our application does not do that. We read the whole needed dataset, nothing less (and definitely nothing more).
Your explanation doesn't narrow down at all the cause of the speedup that you're experiencing. If that 2.4 GB case refers to the data in one table, the database, unless the query and schema fit some narrow conditions (e.g., all of the 8 columns your query wants are stored in the same index), is still reading the 2.4 gig of data. This is because all of the data for each row is stored together in disk; you can't (normally) just read the 8 columns you want.
There is at least one more factor missing from your explanation (which, to be frank, I find hopelessly vague) that's just as essential to explain the speedup you're seeing. One (wild) guess: you're doing some large joins, the database needs to materialize intermediate join results, and losing the stars means those intermediate result sets become at lot smaller. Another (also wild) guess: your application is using the database as a dumb data store, pulling rows one by one from the DB, processing them individually in the application server. That's inevitably going to be very slow.
Let's see... let's say we want Select pcr.dispatch_date, pcr.member number, member_info.member_name (from) where pcr.dispatch_date (is in 2009) order by pcr.dispatch_date...
Loading the full dataset indeed loads a very tiny amount of information, and the memory used by both the SQL server and the script is minimal.
Now, same thing with Select * (from) where pcr.dispatch_date (is in 2009) order by pcr.dispatch_date...
Oddly, it seems to load over 2GB of data - as opposed to a hundred megs.
Get it now? Been there, done that, tested it, watched (in the previous "programmer's" version) the machine start to churn the disk frantically and allocate non-existent physical RAM to virtual RAM. Gee, I wonder how the hard disk works when pretending to be RAM? [sarcasm]They're about the same speed, right?[/sarcasm]
I still use OS/2 whenever I need to format 2 floppy disks at once while compiling C-Kermit and browsing the web.
That "need" come up often?
Hmmm.... dunno about that need, but I know I still use OS/2 when I want to serve high volume websites such as Star Trek New Voyages: Phase 2 on very minimalist hardware (Quad 550MHz), alongside 2 dozen other sites and an FTP server that handles a few terabytes each direction a month - while being able to format two floppies at once.
I can't do that on any version of Windows Server (the site USED to run on it (when hosted by someone else) when it had 1/10th of the traffic... not a pretty scene). And while Linux is an alternative, even it doesn't perform as well on slower hardware (or take as great advantage of faster hardware). It performs far better than Windows - but still not quite as good. Oh, and I am in love with a full featured, integrated REXX - amazing what REXX and PHP can do together.
Blocking sites on copyright grounds is one thing but mis-declaring sites they have a personal beef with as the source of malicious installs is quite another.
Though true, and though I disagree with their behavior in such things, it is still within their rights to do so. The customer(s) will choose whether such restrictions make FB's service worthwhile or not.
This will surprise precisely no one who's ever done business with Dell.
Nor will it be much of a surprise that any mention of such issues on the Dell Forum get deleted with a "strong" email sent out telling the forum member to not post such things again and telling them they cannot speak of the conversation with anyone. This was in regards to a post about a particular series with a faulty mobo for similar reasons. They finished a class action and agreed to fix affected machines... but STILL were posting nonsense crap in the forums "buy a new battery, maybe it's your AC adapter, maybe we're a buncha lying assbags" (ok, all except the last one).
HI DELL!!! Looks like I spoke about it (and this isnt the first time)... I will not be part of your either illegal and/or immoral activities to hide your flaws. Next, maybe I'll post the whole email, as well as my post that got deleted.
I worked on some code done by someone else, where on massive records, they were always selecting "*" instead of the needed or anticipated values. Big waste when one needs (by ID#) last and first name and selects a whole row instead - then wonders why it's not scaling upwards.
Eh, I wonder if you're overstating the performance implications of that. Those are all row-oriented databases. Unless all of the columns your query needs are found in an index, it's going to have to read the whole row from disk anyway; the extra costs from the * then become (a) memory and CPU usage and (b) network bandwidth. In my experience, network bandwidth is usually not a big problem; memory and CPU usage can be an issue, but the big performance killers tend to be inefficient joins (because they don't scale linearly), while scalar stuff (the which the * would fall into) are usually cheap.
Nope, not overstating anything.
Let's say it's an ambulance company database that's used to calculate their LOSAP points for the year... that requires calculations from EVERY data parameter input, since everything a member does goes towards their LOSAP points. In that data are things like their PCRs (Patient Care Reports). Each PCR may have.1MB (not counting scans) of data associated with it. Let's say there are 200 members and 24,000 PCRs. Now... let's assume the server has 2GB of RAM. That's 2.4GB of data to read just from the PCR tables alone if one loads all columns. Or a twenty minute report. Even stepping through record by record (due to the overhead of 24,000 individual read requests JUST for the PCR data - even when using the same DB connection).
Now, selectively loading the 8 small data columns needed from the PCR table, and doing the same with all of the other tables for all of the other parameters needed to calculate LOSAP on the other hand reduces the report to no more than 3 seconds, including data calculations - and that's with loading EVERY needed dataset into server memory for the scripts that make the report.
Yes, my example was only one of numerous things to consider... but it is the example I've given because it's the biggest no-brainer that anyone who works with a database should know; while yours are a little more complex and may not be understood by the people who think they are database programmers.
And yes, my example is a real world example. There were a lot of other issues we ran into as well... we scrapped the entire old system and replaced it from the ground up because we ran into so many poor design choices (some of which directly in line to what you mention). On some of the databases (yes, databases), data was spread across 20 tables - for SMALL datasets, while on others (like the PCR data) it was all glommed into one table. 127 (yes, ONE HUNDRED TWENTY SEVEN) tables in total, across multiple databases... we've dropped that down to one database with 9 tables (only 6 of which are actual data used for stuff like LOSAP, while others are for "incidental" data used by the data entry and access rights system).
Is it people that don't know how to lay out a database or that you need to know how to lay out a database so it does fit with their need?
I see a lot of hate around alternatives to SQL and most of them blame the design of data retention rather than accepting that there may be another way to achieve what is needed. It sounds to me like people trying to justify their job (which may not be necessary under a different model that doesn't need someone to "design" anything.)
Honest question there...
No hate here for non-SQL solutions... Most people buy some crappy (for Enterprise level stuff) tool that makes their databases and have no clue why the things are so slow.
My point is, many things that people THINK *SQL isn't suited for is simply BULL. The reality is those people aren't suited for using *SQL because they dont know what they are doing.
That in no way means other solutions aren't better for other problems/situations.
Example... one of our clients had some "database programmer" (heh) who wrote some software for them. A few hundred requests a day on a small database. Report queries would take (depending on the report) 5-20 MINUTES. The solution isn't getting a non-SQL solution. The solution is that "programmer" should never ever ever ever do anything database related again. Five times the data, and we've got the slowest report running at under 9 seconds... and most of that (6+ seconds) is actually time formatting the output (1 second) and sending the data to the client and the client rendering and displaying the data (5 seconds - that time drops considerably on their one non-ancient client computer). That leaves 3 seconds of actual time being used for BOTH the database queries AND the server side calculations of the data retrieved.
See the point? Nothing at all against non-SQL stuff. But the problem is, many people who simply have no clue how to implement anything database related think the non-SQL stuff is some magic bullet to fix their own deficiencies. Too many people in the various message boards who are discussing this stuff think they need it for their very tiny, very lightly accessed DB driven stuff. Honestly, if they cant handle a few hundred or even few thousand requests a day, on very small tables, do you really think one of these non-SQL solutions will help them? Or do you think with such a tremendous lack of knowledge on their part that instead, such a solution will make things even worse for them?
Slashdot Mirror
It's not as though supreme court justices need to be reelected every few years. Once they're in they're pretty much in for as long as they want to be. So, unless the record companies are remodeling their houses or sending personal 'gifts' for the holidays, I see it as less likely than usual that this a case of corruption. Now, the actual laws that the justices are interpreting... there you have a point.
While it's no indication that they can be bought, fact is people are still greedy. And at $200k-$230K (roughly), there's plenty of buying room for corporate interests to exploit - assuming there are greedy enough people on the SC. Does it mean it happens? No. Does it mean it doesn't? No. Does it mean it's possible? Hell yeah.
People making far more have been bribed... I'd suspect the possibility of buying/bribing someone who's locked into a job for life is probably at least a little higher than bribing someone who's "going somewhere" and has the potential to advance in some fashion.
"This provision was adopted in 1988, well before digital music files became available on the Internet"
So in other words "We get to bend the law to suit our corporate overlord's desires."
LoL, while I think your modding (so far) is warranted, I find it humorous that the first poster pretty much said the same thing but was modded troll. I think you're both probably right (as some other recent USSC cases have proven), and hopefully the AC will earn some better moderation for a probably accurate first post - heck, the attempt at an on topic first post alone should warrant a + mod of some sort (rarity that it is). ;-)
Nope, he's right, you're an idiot. The MS products that are on top, largely are there due to anti-competitive/illegal practices where they were found to be in violation of the law (and found guilty in multiple court cases). But by then, the damage was done. The only product group that does not fit into that category is the xBox/xBox360 line. EVERY other product Microsoft has fits it.
Windows 95/NT-> squashed competition (Novell, OS/2, SunOS/Solaris, numerous others) with numerous anti-competitive acts
DOS -> added code to Win3.x to report unwarranted errors if non-MSDOS used... or code (in some versions) that would prevent Windows from running at all
Early Windows (1.x/2.x)->DeskView and numerous others killed in similar tactics
Disk Compression -> Stole code from Stac Electronics
Office -> created "compatibility issues" in the final release of Win95 (that weren't in the earlier betas) with WordPerfect/Lotus and others.
Internet Explorer -> that's been covered ad-infinitum here, so I wont even get into it.
Windows Phone -> trying to force licensing agreements on the likes of HTC, Motorola and others for non WP7 phones (ie: Android).
Linux -> threatening lawsuits over 200+ patents that Microsoft claims they own that Linux et al are infringing on (umm... which ones?)
Should I go on? Maybe I am getting senile, but I cannot think of a single product that won on merits besides the xBox line of consoles and games.
Guess that either (a) makes you an idiot, or (b) makes you Steve Balmer or one of his media guys trying to keep your job. So, which is it? (a) or (b)
when your shit stinks, focus attention on someone else.
It's more than just that. There was a time when declarations like this from Microsoft would actually garner them more business and fulfill their "prophecies" of such. It seems some at Microsoft still think they have that pull, but reality says such efforts by them are largely far less effective than back in the 90's when it used to work. It's all part and parcel to their extravagant claims that they dont/wont cite figures for, and claims of things lacking on Google's end that have already existed for ages.
Nor does it seem he's got much of any idea what cloud computing is anyway... he compares it to their very botched acquisition of Hotmail in 1997 (err... 1998? Nope... 1997 guy!). I was there (UUNet*) when that acquisition completed. In some ways, their actions then were very much like these current ones. They were deep into extolling the virtues of Windows NT Server, started gaining some marketshare, and got lambasted for not using their own product for Hotmail (as well as being lambasted for all the engineers there who were still running OS/2). They switched Hotmail to Windows, with a massive increase in machines (hundredfold, if memory serves), and still had massive issues with their setup not scaling. Sadly, them extolling how much better they were than the competition, even in light of the reality of their own problems with their own platform handling such traffic, worked pretty well, and Windows Server continued to make inroads.
This is more of the same... claim the (very premature) death of a competitor, the "far better" features of your own product, talk about your competitor's privacy issues when they are willing (and have, numerous times) to sell your data to anyone who's a "Business Partner" and on and on. Nothing new... except this time (as with similar cases recently) it's not working the way it did in the past.
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*For those who don't know or didnt remember, "we" at UUNet actually provided much of the services for MSN... backbone, dialup, routing, and many others (and AOL for that matter... AlterDial was actually ours too). Some who remember that day and age may also remember that there were a few non-dedicated numbers (our overflow numbers) shared by UUNet, AOL and MSN... the logins would determine how we routed them and what service we presented. That's how a few "outsiders" started making the connection between it all.
Uh wow! You know him too?
I actually had a friend who lived in a town named Street (Street, MD).
I mean, it'd be stupid if (say) you google something on Bing and you don't get the Microsoft solution first. I think it'd be weird if you look up "Shopping" and google shopping is at the bottom.
But what used to happen when you first turn on a Windows PC was Internet Explorer as your only browser option - is that not the same thing?
They got rapped over being too dominant within their field - as is Google.
Uh, what? Did you mean "HAPPENS" instead of "happened"?
That still happens (present tense) and when you fire up IE, you get pushed towards Bing!
And who gets to decide that, the competition or a neutral party?
A few billion neutral third parties have said that they like Google's appraisal just fine. If their results weren't so in line with what people want and expect, users would have gone with a different search engine.
That's the way things used to work, but not anymore. In the past, you had to go out and find a search engine. I remember we'd type in hotbot.com or Lycos, or AltaVista, and whatever else we could find and just see which one gave us more of what we were looking for. And at some point, Google was good enough that it became popular like this. But now that they've become dominant, they want to make sure nobody else wins the same way Google did. We are past the time where people go out and find their search engine. We are at a time where Google pays to be included in your web browser, on your desktop, in your phone, and in your workplace. Nobody even asks how to find what they're looking for, or ever gets given a list of addresses for search engines. And no, a dropdown list that nobody is aware of does not count as being given a list of search engine addresses.
To summarize, we're not all using Google because we evaluated all of our options and found them to be the best. We're all using Google because it was shoved down our throats and we have no idea there are other options out there.
Ummm... wake up and visit the Internet. Really. Most people run Windows. Most people use Idiotic Explorer. Most people's default search engine is (or suggested as) BING (since most people use Idiotic Explorer)! Most people STILL end up using Google regardless. And that's not even taking into account that many IE typos, mistakes, URL bar entries or uses of Yahoo (and other sites) actually counts towards Bing usage. Yet still, with not just that choice, but the fact that Bing is pushed on to a bunch of people, people still choose to change to Google.
It's not (as you state or imply) a matter of lack of choices or lack of knowledge of other search engine choices or market dominance due to such lacks. Instead, it's many people CHOOSING to change their default search engine in IE from Bing to Google. And MANY people who have installed AVG choosing to use Google instead of Yahoo (BING) as AVG tries to get them to do.
Dont confuse lack of choices with users choosing Google over Bing, Yahoo, AOL Search, etc.
I'm pretty sure Google is on the line though.
Yes, I also have a feeling they have a clear conscience. As to the reason their own services are ranked high? Of all, surely Google knows how to optimize their pages for Googles page ranking algorithms!
If they really wanted to "do no evil" they would have a clean room team implement the SEO for their own services using only publicly published information. After all using some secret way to get to the top of the list has the same affect as building in a bias for your site.
I know most people don't RTFA, but I'd suggest you do... just this once. Let me spell out the highlights for you.
(1) Foundem simply copies much of it's content from other sources. EVERY webmaster worth his keyboard (even if they don't own a 24 year old IBM Model M like me) knows that's a sure-fire way of DECREASING your ranking. I've known that for YEARS.
(2) The other complainant is a French Search Engine... honestly, do you think a relevant listing would be to return a list of other search engines where you could re-do your search? Think about it... if you googled "cars", would you expect to see a link to Bing to then "Bing" cars?
While what you suggest may be good in theory and even in practice, it's totally unrelated to the case at hand. SOOOOOO drastically unrelated (since your suggestion should in NO way change those two companies' rankings) that you actually should have earned a "-1 Off Topic" mod. Fortunately, virtually no one RTFA. This just happens to be the week (I pick 4 weeks a year) that I am spending the time to RTFA
These dumped extensions can be disabled and uninstalled only from a root account. If you are using a lower privilege account for day to day ops, the uninstall button is grayed out. These extensions are assumed to be installed for "all users" and one low privileged user would/should not be able to take them out. It is a pain to log out, and log in as superuser just to disable one extension that some corporate creep decides to shove on my machine.
Not quite true. Microsoft has disabled the uninstall option for ClickOnce (something since resolved) regardless of account permissions.
Even after that, I've noticed (during a scan with ComboFix) that even after UNINSTALLING .NET CrapOnce stuff, there's a hidden key located on the system still. Is the plugin simply being hidden from the plugins tool in Firefox, or is the key still in Firefox for a different reason?
Considering I was running ComboFix on this machine because of a drive-by exploit that targets .NET/ClickOnce, I'm "not sure" but I have my suspicions. Which brings up the question, "Can a plugin uninstall be faked and the plugin status be hidden from Firefox (whilst the plugin is actually still active)?"
That aside, back to the point at hand: plugin manufacturers can disable plugin uninstallation, regardless of account privileges.
I bet you a bunch from /. have been now... and I wonder how long the DDoS-like scenario lives on because of the Slashdot Effect. Which also makes me wonder if anyone has ever done a study on the DoubleDDoS attack... DDoS some big company, then post the news to Slashdot when your efforts either (a) start to slow down or (b) are being countered... all so it can start all over again with the help of all of us.... I mean you guys... (heck, I never RTFA or click the links).
I'm happy to hear you won't read the mails. I take your word for this, ISP's, because you're trustworthy! Thanks for giving me your word, and only reading other parts of my surfing habits!
They... refrain from reading the emails... I wonder if their software is under such restrictions.
Oh!!!! But they offered free adware software in the past... which would simply allow them to collect even more information (like all your offline information). Neato!
I trust them!!!! You should too!!![/sarcasm]
How about this then: Lets let Ma Bell listen to your phone calls using "deep packet inspection" so they can serve you up advertising. Both are communications channels.
I didn't say it was right (though, AFAIR, Ma Bell already does that - sans the advertising part). I just said you made a very bad analogy, and that there are no laws that apply to prevent such from occurring, unlike (due to the differences in your analogy) the stuff you used in your renter's analogy.
So, again, I fully think this sucks, and should not happen. I was just pointing out that sadly, there is nothing to prohibit it that I can find, as long as the TOS allows it. I can't think of an analogy that fits, since I can't find a legal basis for this to be prohibited... but then again, I am not a lawyer; maybe there is one someplace.
Where one lives is governed my a different set of rules because the circumstances are entirely different. Physical objects, expectation of being able to be totally naked without being spied on (ie: shower, bedroom, or anywhere else simply for the hell of it).
Also, housing is deemed for many legal purposes, as your own while it is being rented. You don't buy (in any legal sense) the Internet when you get a connection.
Also, one chooses what they put online, or what they do online. Which is far different from the expectation of what one will have in their house/apartment.
Totally different than the Internet. Totally bad analogy that doesnt match on any criteria.
Actually, YOU should read YOUR TOS so you can see there are a large number of things that the ISPs can do, but haven't been doing up until this point. Much like how a certain OS manufacturer used to have a buncha services that the TOS stated they could use to sell anything you uploaded... and then later added an option in their picture service to do just that...
Most people never read the fine print in their TOS. I have.
Most people never stop long enough to try to determine what the term "business partner" covers... I have. In most companies' definition, it includes anyone who pays them.
Most of the people who actually do read a TOS, never stop to think about what the open ended phrases and "up to" phrases mean. I'm not one of those people either.
Heck, I've seen various usage agreements and TOS' that allow the company to do just slightly above nothing in offering you a service. Then it becomes a battle of "reasonable expectations" in what can be a costly court case.
My subordinate clauses got tangled. (Not that I think it's right to republish entire articles) "without permission, even with a citation".
Fortunately the law is not based on what you think it right or wrong... ;-)
Ummm, thanks for the Funny mod, but really, Alex and I have known each other for years now. We've worked together on Star Trek Phase 2. Check out his work... pretty talented guy.
Another (also wild) guess: your application is using the database as a dumb data store, pulling rows one by one from the DB, processing them individually in the application server. That's inevitably going to be very slow.
No, our application does not do that. We read the whole needed dataset, nothing less (and definitely nothing more).
Your explanation doesn't narrow down at all the cause of the speedup that you're experiencing. If that 2.4 GB case refers to the data in one table, the database, unless the query and schema fit some narrow conditions (e.g., all of the 8 columns your query wants are stored in the same index), is still reading the 2.4 gig of data. This is because all of the data for each row is stored together in disk; you can't (normally) just read the 8 columns you want.
There is at least one more factor missing from your explanation (which, to be frank, I find hopelessly vague) that's just as essential to explain the speedup you're seeing. One (wild) guess: you're doing some large joins, the database needs to materialize intermediate join results, and losing the stars means those intermediate result sets become at lot smaller. Another (also wild) guess: your application is using the database as a dumb data store, pulling rows one by one from the DB, processing them individually in the application server. That's inevitably going to be very slow.
Let's see... let's say we want Select pcr.dispatch_date, pcr.member number, member_info.member_name (from) where pcr.dispatch_date (is in 2009) order by pcr.dispatch_date...
Loading the full dataset indeed loads a very tiny amount of information, and the memory used by both the SQL server and the script is minimal.
Now, same thing with Select * (from) where pcr.dispatch_date (is in 2009) order by pcr.dispatch_date...
Oddly, it seems to load over 2GB of data - as opposed to a hundred megs.
Get it now? Been there, done that, tested it, watched (in the previous "programmer's" version) the machine start to churn the disk frantically and allocate non-existent physical RAM to virtual RAM. Gee, I wonder how the hard disk works when pretending to be RAM? [sarcasm]They're about the same speed, right?[/sarcasm]
I guess you never know who you'll run into on the Internets
LoL Alex, I run into you all the time online... :-)
I still use OS/2 whenever I need to format 2 floppy disks at once while compiling C-Kermit and browsing the web.
That "need" come up often?
Hmmm.... dunno about that need, but I know I still use OS/2 when I want to serve high volume websites such as Star Trek New Voyages: Phase 2 on very minimalist hardware (Quad 550MHz), alongside 2 dozen other sites and an FTP server that handles a few terabytes each direction a month - while being able to format two floppies at once.
I can't do that on any version of Windows Server (the site USED to run on it (when hosted by someone else) when it had 1/10th of the traffic... not a pretty scene). And while Linux is an alternative, even it doesn't perform as well on slower hardware (or take as great advantage of faster hardware). It performs far better than Windows - but still not quite as good. Oh, and I am in love with a full featured, integrated REXX - amazing what REXX and PHP can do together.
OK... all but the floppy formatting part is true.
Blocking sites on copyright grounds is one thing but mis-declaring sites they have a personal beef with as the source of malicious installs is quite another.
Though true, and though I disagree with their behavior in such things, it is still within their rights to do so. The customer(s) will choose whether such restrictions make FB's service worthwhile or not.
This will surprise precisely no one who's ever done business with Dell.
Nor will it be much of a surprise that any mention of such issues on the Dell Forum get deleted with a "strong" email sent out telling the forum member to not post such things again and telling them they cannot speak of the conversation with anyone. This was in regards to a post about a particular series with a faulty mobo for similar reasons. They finished a class action and agreed to fix affected machines... but STILL were posting nonsense crap in the forums "buy a new battery, maybe it's your AC adapter, maybe we're a buncha lying assbags" (ok, all except the last one).
HI DELL!!! Looks like I spoke about it (and this isnt the first time)... I will not be part of your either illegal and/or immoral activities to hide your flaws. Next, maybe I'll post the whole email, as well as my post that got deleted.
I worked on some code done by someone else, where on massive records, they were always selecting "*" instead of the needed or anticipated values. Big waste when one needs (by ID#) last and first name and selects a whole row instead - then wonders why it's not scaling upwards.
Eh, I wonder if you're overstating the performance implications of that. Those are all row-oriented databases. Unless all of the columns your query needs are found in an index, it's going to have to read the whole row from disk anyway; the extra costs from the * then become (a) memory and CPU usage and (b) network bandwidth. In my experience, network bandwidth is usually not a big problem; memory and CPU usage can be an issue, but the big performance killers tend to be inefficient joins (because they don't scale linearly), while scalar stuff (the which the * would fall into) are usually cheap.
Nope, not overstating anything.
Let's say it's an ambulance company database that's used to calculate their LOSAP points for the year... that requires calculations from EVERY data parameter input, since everything a member does goes towards their LOSAP points. In that data are things like their PCRs (Patient Care Reports). Each PCR may have .1MB (not counting scans) of data associated with it. Let's say there are 200 members and 24,000 PCRs. Now... let's assume the server has 2GB of RAM. That's 2.4GB of data to read just from the PCR tables alone if one loads all columns. Or a twenty minute report. Even stepping through record by record (due to the overhead of 24,000 individual read requests JUST for the PCR data - even when using the same DB connection).
Now, selectively loading the 8 small data columns needed from the PCR table, and doing the same with all of the other tables for all of the other parameters needed to calculate LOSAP on the other hand reduces the report to no more than 3 seconds, including data calculations - and that's with loading EVERY needed dataset into server memory for the scripts that make the report.
Yes, my example was only one of numerous things to consider... but it is the example I've given because it's the biggest no-brainer that anyone who works with a database should know; while yours are a little more complex and may not be understood by the people who think they are database programmers.
And yes, my example is a real world example. There were a lot of other issues we ran into as well... we scrapped the entire old system and replaced it from the ground up because we ran into so many poor design choices (some of which directly in line to what you mention). On some of the databases (yes, databases), data was spread across 20 tables - for SMALL datasets, while on others (like the PCR data) it was all glommed into one table. 127 (yes, ONE HUNDRED TWENTY SEVEN) tables in total, across multiple databases... we've dropped that down to one database with 9 tables (only 6 of which are actual data used for stuff like LOSAP, while others are for "incidental" data used by the data entry and access rights system).
Is it people that don't know how to lay out a database or that you need to know how to lay out a database so it does fit with their need?
I see a lot of hate around alternatives to SQL and most of them blame the design of data retention rather than accepting that there may be another way to achieve what is needed. It sounds to me like people trying to justify their job (which may not be necessary under a different model that doesn't need someone to "design" anything.)
Honest question there...
No hate here for non-SQL solutions... Most people buy some crappy (for Enterprise level stuff) tool that makes their databases and have no clue why the things are so slow.
My point is, many things that people THINK *SQL isn't suited for is simply BULL. The reality is those people aren't suited for using *SQL because they dont know what they are doing.
That in no way means other solutions aren't better for other problems/situations.
Example... one of our clients had some "database programmer" (heh) who wrote some software for them. A few hundred requests a day on a small database. Report queries would take (depending on the report) 5-20 MINUTES. The solution isn't getting a non-SQL solution. The solution is that "programmer" should never ever ever ever do anything database related again. Five times the data, and we've got the slowest report running at under 9 seconds... and most of that (6+ seconds) is actually time formatting the output (1 second) and sending the data to the client and the client rendering and displaying the data (5 seconds - that time drops considerably on their one non-ancient client computer). That leaves 3 seconds of actual time being used for BOTH the database queries AND the server side calculations of the data retrieved.
See the point? Nothing at all against non-SQL stuff. But the problem is, many people who simply have no clue how to implement anything database related think the non-SQL stuff is some magic bullet to fix their own deficiencies. Too many people in the various message boards who are discussing this stuff think they need it for their very tiny, very lightly accessed DB driven stuff. Honestly, if they cant handle a few hundred or even few thousand requests a day, on very small tables, do you really think one of these non-SQL solutions will help them? Or do you think with such a tremendous lack of knowledge on their part that instead, such a solution will make things even worse for them?