People can post anything to a great number of websites.
The interesting thing is the signal to noise ratio of sites is what determines if I read them or not.
I stopped reading http://news.zdnet.co.uk a few years back. It was very bias towards Microsoft and the comments from other visitors are largely uninformed or flame wars.
http://slashdot.org seems to be the king of commenting but it has the added bonus of being able to moderate comments up or down. You can still get flame wars but you also can find a nugget of gold. I have in the last year been reading it less and less, mainly due to realising that many people are commenting before reading the article. The first post syndrome is kicking in.
On http://lwn.net the weekly edition is subscribers only for the first week. The level of information is very high at the site. The information on the site is at the top end of technical. Comments are very high quality.
I started reading Scott Adams blog (the creator of Dilbert) and recently he turned off full blog posts in his news feeds, you have to visit the site (see the adverts) to read what he has to say (fair enough).
It made me wonder what happens to the quality of the comments on his blog. Surely people who read the blog using a news reader and now can not are not visiting his page (I am not visiting it as much). Surely its the more intelligent people that know how to use news readers that are no longer visiting the site. Therefore I propose that the average IQ of the readership might be dropping.
With any site that allows comments you have to manage the signal to noise ratio and deleting posts that are just nonsense can lead to cries of censorship.
I am more convinced not to read comments on sites. If somebody has something to say they can create a blog. If that blog is authoritative it should gain recognition in the way of peer review and cross linking. All we have now is people shouting what they think is true.
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Monday, December 03, 2007
Desktop search
Why?
Last year I could not see the point of Google's desktop search, this year Microsoft have installed it on my servers! I was quick to block it on my desktop but wonder why we need it?
Is the idea of folders going away? I put my receipts in one folder, my icons in another, my letters in another. Its not hard. The accountants that work below us put documents into folders based on the client name and then year. Its not hard.
How often in the last ~20 years of computing have I wanted to find every file on my computer that contains the word cranberry? My ubuntu upgrade to 7.10 enabled desktop search. I turned it off asap, why do I want something indexing files I am never going to search on?
If you think the impact of running the service is low, just consider that disk drive access is the slowest part of any computer, then consider that each time you modify a file or save a file the index will have to be updated. So having the index isn't expensive but maintaining it is.
In today's carbon footprint aware society, I think developers need to think about the carbon impact of maintaining indexes on hundreds of millions of PC's which will probably only ever be used 0.001% of the time.
(Caveat: Clearly some people have memories like a fish and this is a useful tool but not a mass market tool)
Last year I could not see the point of Google's desktop search, this year Microsoft have installed it on my servers! I was quick to block it on my desktop but wonder why we need it?
Is the idea of folders going away? I put my receipts in one folder, my icons in another, my letters in another. Its not hard. The accountants that work below us put documents into folders based on the client name and then year. Its not hard.
How often in the last ~20 years of computing have I wanted to find every file on my computer that contains the word cranberry? My ubuntu upgrade to 7.10 enabled desktop search. I turned it off asap, why do I want something indexing files I am never going to search on?
If you think the impact of running the service is low, just consider that disk drive access is the slowest part of any computer, then consider that each time you modify a file or save a file the index will have to be updated. So having the index isn't expensive but maintaining it is.
In today's carbon footprint aware society, I think developers need to think about the carbon impact of maintaining indexes on hundreds of millions of PC's which will probably only ever be used 0.001% of the time.
(Caveat: Clearly some people have memories like a fish and this is a useful tool but not a mass market tool)
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