The company is allowing concerns about its public image to influence the search results it dishes up.
Wow! What the hell motivation do you think Google was built on in the first place? The motivation was to achieve popularity, by being a good search engine. Yes, that's the "public image" they aimed for. So, what changed?
Let's not forget that Google's machine is not our machine. It's Google's, for better or worse.
OMG. Do you actually mean to tell me... I didn't invent Google?
Seriously, the entire lame article was just one big excuse to use the word "salubrious".
I can confirm that, too. I saw the.01% figure on their site before they corrected it. (I was quite interested in whether or not they actually wrote it.)
Linux didn't fail to meet your needs, it was the entire community and their business practices that failed you.
This is kind of mincing words. The guy said Linux failed to meet his needs, because it didn't meet his needs. You don't need to take that away to still make your point about business practices.
His problem was that his goals were ill-fated. He didn't have a problem configuring drivers for wireless cards or anything like that (which you spoke about). He was trying to access Office documents and Exchange servers from a Linux environment. Now I don't know jack shit about OpenOffice or Evolution, but come on, Office and Exchange... could there be anything more Microsoft? It reeks of being a losing battle from the start. I'm sure I could start a flame war saying that, and the open source community is making great strides and everything, but what can you really expect?
This guy should give up on this ill-fated dream of Linux/Microsoft symbiosis, and just access the Microsoft crap from a cheap 5-year-old PC running Office XP. Sorry, but it's just practical. If he's a real geek, he can probably find another use for Linux in the work place, something it's better suited for and really excels at.
I'm not sure ignoring patients' comments necessarily makes a good doctor. I'm sure there are a lot of idiots saying dumb shit to their doctors. And I don't blame doctors for just gradually filtering out that stuff and ignoring what the patients have to say. But I don't know if it's good.
In the times I've dealt with doctors I've come to realize that the vast majority of them are not interested in listening to your self-diagnosis. And we probably have idiotic patients brainwashed by advertising to thank for that. Doctors just want to perform tests or give you some medicine to experiment with and see if it makes a difference. And that's great, it works well for colds and flus and simple ailments. But for more complex things, they can make mistakes, or have a bias for expensive surgical procedures. You can go in there with allergy symptoms and end up under the knife, just because your doctor has grown accustomed to working in his own insular little world. And I don't know if that's better.
Either way, I think you have to view your doctor as very skilled resource, but ultimately it's yourself who is responsible for your own well-being.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Listen. Spam absolutely does have a definition: Unsolicited bulk or commercial e-mail.
Trust me on this one, I spent four years killing spammers at a major ISP and am intimately familiar with the kinds of stuff people consider spam, whether it actually is or not.
OK, you're right. There is a definition for spam when you're a person working for a major ISP, responsible for shutting down verified spammers. Of course there is. But when you are anybody else, like Joe End-User, that definition isn't so firm, and it's unrealistic to think it should be. Joe End-User is going to put the label "spam" on any message he doesn't want, and there's no point trying to stop him. You should know that from your experience.
People absolutely do report all manner of legitimate e-mail as spam.
That's because for them, it is spam. "Spam" is a word that carries different meanings for different parties and that was my entire point in saying that there is no objective definition. People just don't share the same definition. And we both know that. The best you can do is verify whether their definition matches yours, once the issue escalates to the ISP.
Nowadays you have real spammers that are disruptive, invasive, fraudulent and don't care that they are these things. This is the real spam.
No, dude. There is no objective definition of spam. If Fred calls something spam, then for Fred, it's spam. It doesn't matter if the sender was a legitimate business, or even if he signed up for the newsletter in the first place. If he doesn't want it anymore, then he can go ahead and click the "this is spam" button in his e-mail client, and it will be right.
What I hate is that there is little room left on the internet for legitimate advertising.
If that's true, then how did Google grow into a $150 billion company in just 8 years?
When I put advertisements in my signature line, I try not to be invasive, fraudulent or deceptive. But yet people treat me like I'm hell incarnate. I think that's wrong.
Then you should drop the "Mention Slashdot and 2 free months of service." It makes you sound like a damn used car salesman.
Where's the need come from?
on
Water From Wind
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Does this country face a more urgent issue? Will the world have a greater problem? While we watch our dams dry, our rivers die, our lakes and groundwater disappear...
Forgive me for being unaware of this impending catatrophe, but is there really an urgent issue? Is this mainly happening in Australia? I thought floods were going to be the next big problem, due to global warming.
What should I be bracing myself for? Floods or droughts? I need to know what I should panic about. Thanks.
TFA is nothing more than a press release announcing the plan to develop a supercomputer in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Yeah, it'll be made by IBM and based on Cell (and Opteron). In an attempt to make it more interesting, the article seems to struggle to make another point... and the point is difficult to discern from its river of vague generalities, lame statistics and other banalities. Best I can fathom is that the writer (IBM's chief architect) simply hopes that new, multicore-centered development tools will somehow emerge as a result of the computer's development:
We are inviting industry partners to define the components (APIs, tools, etc.) of the programming methodology so that the multicore systems are accessible to those partners as well.
Fair enough. The Slashdot summary is a horrible spin on TFA, and the attached "-dept." tagline attached is just embarassing. Too bad there wasn't more information content here, because multicore processing is indeed the future, and this could have been a much more interesting read.
how close are we to being able to specify a standard driver model, with compatibility across operating systems?
Sorry if I sound pedantic, but we are already "able" to specify a standard driver model. I can specify one right now: the Linux driver model. It's pretty well-documented; just check out "Linux Kernel In a Nutshell" or "Linux Device Drivers" or the Linux kernel source.
Specifying one is not a problem. It's getting OS developers to adopt it that's a problem. Microsoft obviously isn't going to adopt Linux' driver model since they have so much invested in their own. Linux can't adopt Microsoft's because it's proprietary. Most of the reasons are political.
But there are also technical reasons. With a common driver model, you would force every OS to adopt a layer of abstraction or API which they might not want to have. Every layer of API inserted into a system adds overhead and degrades performance. No other OS would have a chance of kicking the ass of any other OS, performance-wise. In fact the performance advantage would go to the OS which the standard was most closely based on. Therefore, no OS wants to adopt any other OS' native model - they would only do a worse job of it by comparison.
Woah dude. Nobody said it's just geeks who get picked on, for being geeks. When I was in high school, one of the school's most popular girls went through a nasty case of harassment that even got the principal involved. Hell, I was picked on in grade 5 by a group of grade 1's, and look how cool I am! It happens to all kinds. Get over yourself.
Kylie Kenney heard a crescendo of whispers and jeers as she moved through an otherwise unremarkable eighth-grade school day. The reason: Word had spread of a Web site posted by some of her peers, titled "Kill Kylie Incorporated."
Does anyone else think that when somebody puts up a website called "Kill Kylie Incorporated", it's the person putting up the site who looks like a big fucking idiot?
OK, all you need are 8 of these neural data links, interfaced to a twisted pair cable. Plug that into a 10-BASE-T hub, and think really really fast to implement the 802.3 protocol in your brain. As long as you can remember your MAC address, you're golden.
Why not hook them up to a midi keyboard or real guitar then start off slow with some simple tracks, and move to more complicated/difficult tracks?
Because then, very few people would buy the game (too much up-front cost) and very few people would enjoy it (long learning curve). The basic joy of Guitar Hero is that almost anybody can play it immediately. You want something for a more hardcore musical audience. But that audience is probably going to teach themselves a real instrument anyway.
In fact whenever you think about it, you start missing notes.
You nailed it. I love it when people comment about that. Generally speaking, there's huge difference between paying direct attention to what you are doing, versus analyzing what you are doing, and rhythm games make you aware of the difference pretty quickly.
They interviewed this guy on the Daily Show last year. Fun watch. He insisted he was not a "spammer" but rather a "high volume e-mail deployer". He also argued that people "want" to get the e-mails he deploys.
I wonder how he will spin unsolicited bulletins sent from stolen MySpace accounts? "People enjoy receiving bulletins from their friends about valuable products and services. We just help them do that."
Richter gained access to MySpace user accounts via phishing schemes, or took control of accounts that had already been phished, and then used the service's bulletin feature.
In many ways, the reverse is true - what is not backed up will gain value because of its rarity. Imagine how much you could make if you found a lost Shakespeare sonnet today - discarded by Shakespeare because he thought it was utter crap.
...outweigh Wikipedia's rôle as a semantic mediator between alien but related nodes?
False premise. Wikipedia is not a "semantic mediator between alien but related nodes". Wikipedia is just a free encyclopedia.
The only reason why an external link should be placed in Wikipedia is because that external link is already significant in some way. Wikipedia does not exist to make those external links any more significant than they already are. It seems to me that is the essential point of the Wikipedia policy, Wikipedia is not a soapbox.
So, since there is no such "tragedy of the commons", Wikipedia is free to tag their links "nofollow" if they want to. If it raises Wikipedia's search results over the external links in Google, good for them. That's the way it should be. These bloggers who nitpick about Google PageRanks 24/7 strike me as a bunch of whiners, frankly.
That just shows he's objective. I work in game development, and back when he said OpenGL was better (vs. DX6) I believe he was right, and now that he prefers DX9, I believe he's right too. His integrity is pretty good. He focuses on the technology right in front of him, without being distracted by politics or favortism.
An international team of scientists is developing what they say will be the world's first microrobot... While others have tried and failed to create microrobots for arterial travel, Friend believes his team will succeed...
The Slashdot headline:
Surgical Microbot Developed.
Re:Not impressed
on
iPhone Roundup
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
People are easily blinded by futility.
We're easily blinded... by futility? How does that work? "Hey, check this thing out. It's sooo futile, there's no point to it whatsoever! Wow! I'm blind now, and I'll pay any price! That's how pointless I think this thing is."
What you probably meant to say was that people are easily blinded by something else, perhaps a good sales pitch, and that makes them overlook futility. That makes more sense. There, I fixed your flame. You're welcome.
Slashdot Mirror
Here are a few shining turds from TFA:
Wow! What the hell motivation do you think Google was built on in the first place? The motivation was to achieve popularity, by being a good search engine. Yes, that's the "public image" they aimed for. So, what changed?
OMG. Do you actually mean to tell me... I didn't invent Google?
Seriously, the entire lame article was just one big excuse to use the word "salubrious".
I can confirm that, too. I saw the .01% figure on their site before they corrected it. (I was quite interested in whether or not they actually wrote it.)
This is kind of mincing words. The guy said Linux failed to meet his needs, because it didn't meet his needs. You don't need to take that away to still make your point about business practices.
His problem was that his goals were ill-fated. He didn't have a problem configuring drivers for wireless cards or anything like that (which you spoke about). He was trying to access Office documents and Exchange servers from a Linux environment. Now I don't know jack shit about OpenOffice or Evolution, but come on, Office and Exchange... could there be anything more Microsoft? It reeks of being a losing battle from the start. I'm sure I could start a flame war saying that, and the open source community is making great strides and everything, but what can you really expect?
This guy should give up on this ill-fated dream of Linux/Microsoft symbiosis, and just access the Microsoft crap from a cheap 5-year-old PC running Office XP. Sorry, but it's just practical. If he's a real geek, he can probably find another use for Linux in the work place, something it's better suited for and really excels at.
I'm not sure ignoring patients' comments necessarily makes a good doctor. I'm sure there are a lot of idiots saying dumb shit to their doctors. And I don't blame doctors for just gradually filtering out that stuff and ignoring what the patients have to say. But I don't know if it's good.
In the times I've dealt with doctors I've come to realize that the vast majority of them are not interested in listening to your self-diagnosis. And we probably have idiotic patients brainwashed by advertising to thank for that. Doctors just want to perform tests or give you some medicine to experiment with and see if it makes a difference. And that's great, it works well for colds and flus and simple ailments. But for more complex things, they can make mistakes, or have a bias for expensive surgical procedures. You can go in there with allergy symptoms and end up under the knife, just because your doctor has grown accustomed to working in his own insular little world. And I don't know if that's better.
Either way, I think you have to view your doctor as very skilled resource, but ultimately it's yourself who is responsible for your own well-being.
OK, you're right. There is a definition for spam when you're a person working for a major ISP, responsible for shutting down verified spammers. Of course there is. But when you are anybody else, like Joe End-User, that definition isn't so firm, and it's unrealistic to think it should be. Joe End-User is going to put the label "spam" on any message he doesn't want, and there's no point trying to stop him. You should know that from your experience.
That's because for them, it is spam. "Spam" is a word that carries different meanings for different parties and that was my entire point in saying that there is no objective definition. People just don't share the same definition. And we both know that. The best you can do is verify whether their definition matches yours, once the issue escalates to the ISP.
Wow, not so good with percentages. I wonder if they made the same kind of error with this other figure they cited?
That's why I asked.
No, dude. There is no objective definition of spam. If Fred calls something spam, then for Fred, it's spam. It doesn't matter if the sender was a legitimate business, or even if he signed up for the newsletter in the first place. If he doesn't want it anymore, then he can go ahead and click the "this is spam" button in his e-mail client, and it will be right.
If that's true, then how did Google grow into a $150 billion company in just 8 years?
Then you should drop the "Mention Slashdot and 2 free months of service." It makes you sound like a damn used car salesman.
Forgive me for being unaware of this impending catatrophe, but is there really an urgent issue? Is this mainly happening in Australia? I thought floods were going to be the next big problem, due to global warming.
What should I be bracing myself for? Floods or droughts? I need to know what I should panic about. Thanks.
TFA is nothing more than a press release announcing the plan to develop a supercomputer in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Yeah, it'll be made by IBM and based on Cell (and Opteron). In an attempt to make it more interesting, the article seems to struggle to make another point... and the point is difficult to discern from its river of vague generalities, lame statistics and other banalities. Best I can fathom is that the writer (IBM's chief architect) simply hopes that new, multicore-centered development tools will somehow emerge as a result of the computer's development:
Fair enough. The Slashdot summary is a horrible spin on TFA, and the attached "-dept." tagline attached is just embarassing. Too bad there wasn't more information content here, because multicore processing is indeed the future, and this could have been a much more interesting read.
Sorry if I sound pedantic, but we are already "able" to specify a standard driver model. I can specify one right now: the Linux driver model. It's pretty well-documented; just check out "Linux Kernel In a Nutshell" or "Linux Device Drivers" or the Linux kernel source.
Specifying one is not a problem. It's getting OS developers to adopt it that's a problem. Microsoft obviously isn't going to adopt Linux' driver model since they have so much invested in their own. Linux can't adopt Microsoft's because it's proprietary. Most of the reasons are political.
But there are also technical reasons. With a common driver model, you would force every OS to adopt a layer of abstraction or API which they might not want to have. Every layer of API inserted into a system adds overhead and degrades performance. No other OS would have a chance of kicking the ass of any other OS, performance-wise. In fact the performance advantage would go to the OS which the standard was most closely based on. Therefore, no OS wants to adopt any other OS' native model - they would only do a worse job of it by comparison.
Woah dude. Nobody said it's just geeks who get picked on, for being geeks. When I was in high school, one of the school's most popular girls went through a nasty case of harassment that even got the principal involved. Hell, I was picked on in grade 5 by a group of grade 1's, and look how cool I am! It happens to all kinds. Get over yourself.
Does anyone else think that when somebody puts up a website called "Kill Kylie Incorporated", it's the person putting up the site who looks like a big fucking idiot?
OK, all you need are 8 of these neural data links, interfaced to a twisted pair cable. Plug that into a 10-BASE-T hub, and think really really fast to implement the 802.3 protocol in your brain. As long as you can remember your MAC address, you're golden.
Whose current idea of death? I assure you my current idea of death is quite different from yours.
You mean like Slashdot?
Because then, very few people would buy the game (too much up-front cost) and very few people would enjoy it (long learning curve). The basic joy of Guitar Hero is that almost anybody can play it immediately. You want something for a more hardcore musical audience. But that audience is probably going to teach themselves a real instrument anyway.
You nailed it. I love it when people comment about that. Generally speaking, there's huge difference between paying direct attention to what you are doing, versus analyzing what you are doing, and rhythm games make you aware of the difference pretty quickly.
They interviewed this guy on the Daily Show last year. Fun watch. He insisted he was not a "spammer" but rather a "high volume e-mail deployer". He also argued that people "want" to get the e-mails he deploys.
I wonder how he will spin unsolicited bulletins sent from stolen MySpace accounts? "People enjoy receiving bulletins from their friends about valuable products and services. We just help them do that."
Profitable != good.
False premise. Wikipedia is not a "semantic mediator between alien but related nodes". Wikipedia is just a free encyclopedia.
The only reason why an external link should be placed in Wikipedia is because that external link is already significant in some way. Wikipedia does not exist to make those external links any more significant than they already are. It seems to me that is the essential point of the Wikipedia policy, Wikipedia is not a soapbox.
So, since there is no such "tragedy of the commons", Wikipedia is free to tag their links "nofollow" if they want to. If it raises Wikipedia's search results over the external links in Google, good for them. That's the way it should be. These bloggers who nitpick about Google PageRanks 24/7 strike me as a bunch of whiners, frankly.
Maybe if the food industry didn't fuck so much with food to maximize profits in the first place, people wouldn't have so many troubled stomachs?
That just shows he's objective. I work in game development, and back when he said OpenGL was better (vs. DX6) I believe he was right, and now that he prefers DX9, I believe he's right too. His integrity is pretty good. He focuses on the technology right in front of him, without being distracted by politics or favortism.
Sorry, I'm still new here.
The article:
The Slashdot headline:
We're easily blinded... by futility? How does that work? "Hey, check this thing out. It's sooo futile, there's no point to it whatsoever! Wow! I'm blind now, and I'll pay any price! That's how pointless I think this thing is."
What you probably meant to say was that people are easily blinded by something else, perhaps a good sales pitch, and that makes them overlook futility. That makes more sense. There, I fixed your flame. You're welcome.