Number one on the list: what is the meaning of life.
Number two: what happens if you actually buy something from spam email?
The answer may surprise you.
Now, if he can just buy some of that cheap v1@gr@ or C1@l1s, it’ll make men around the world happy or sad at the same time.
Patrick Ruffini has discovered a SiteMeter flaw that over-estimates the number of unique visitors to a site.
His hypothesis seems to be corroborated by looking at other sites, especially Michelle Malkin’s site (it’s lucky for this test that she redesigned her site in a unique manner to support Ruffini’s claims).
Patrick noted that SiteMeter only counts up to 100 visitors (for the basic, free service– the premium stores up to 4,000). After that, if visitor 101 clicks on a link on Kos, it says it’s a unique visitor. On a site like Kos, it’s entirely possible to have visitor 101 click on a link on Kos after 1 minute and be counted a unique visitor.
This flaw is just not for Kos, but for any high-traffic site using basic SiteMeter. If you look at Michelle Malkin’s Sitemeter track for the past 12 months, you’ll see a jump in page visitors and page views in June, when she instituted her new format. Malkin gets a lot of traffic (sadly, not as much as Kos), but she gets enough to verify the hypothesis that the site-meter clicky problem exists. Note that to access a story on MichelleMalkin.com that’s not the headline story, you need to click on the sidebar link. This generates more click-throughs, and as a result, a greater number of unique visitors. If you do the math, she gets approximately 1 visitor every 1.6 seconds, so her “flip time” is roughly 62 seconds. So if a reader browses the first story for just over a minute, then clicks on a side story, that reader is a new visitor, according to SiteMeter.
Now, if you look at Kos, he gets 450,000 visitors a day, which is about 5 visitors a second. That means every 20 seconds, someone clicking at Kos’ site is a new visitor. In this case, the bigger your site, the bigger the statistical inflation of your # of visitors.
The SiteMeter FAQ seems to dispute this, but the evidence gathered here seems to be contrary to that belief. An additional test to verify this hypothesis would be to make the two SiteMeter pay sites (which allow 4000 stores referrals) and see if Kos and Malkin experience a decrease in visitors but a retention in page views.
Especially in the blogosphere.
Is it too late to bring civility to the Web?
The conversational free-for-all on the Internet known as the blogosphere can be a prickly and unpleasant place. Now, a few high-profile figures in high-tech are proposing a blogger code of conduct to clean up the quality of online discourse.
Last week, Tim O’Reilly, a conference promoter and book publisher who is credited with coining the term Web 2.0, began working with Jimmy Wales, creator of the communal online encyclopedia Wikipedia, to create a set of guidelines to shape online discussion and debate.
Chief among the recommendations is that bloggers consider banning anonymous comments left by visitors to their pages and be able to delete threatening or libelous comments without facing cries of censorship.
Civility to the web? I’m more concerned about the NYT Fashion Department!
They want the system to be voluntary, where participants post on their site what set of guidelines they abide by.
What’s insulting about this process is that many of the big, mainstream blogs already self-censor (especially on the “right” side of the blogosphere).
As for me, I will let most comments go so long as they aren’t libelous, spam, or threatening.
But the biggest problem I see is that by abiding by these “guidelines” it could leave operators of blogs open to lawsuits because a comment wasn’t properly policed.
Suppose on Little Green Footballs, a blog which regularly has over 500 comments a post, has a comment on there that wishes death upon Fred Barnes (it’s hypothetical, don’t start looking you ninny!). And suppose Charles has posted commenting guidelines that say he’ll remove any post that is threatening. Could LGF then be sued because they didn’t follow the guidelines? So suppose there’s a flame war on Right Thinking from the Left Coast (something that happens often enough) and one commenter threatens another with a beating. If Lee is following posting regulation #4, and misses the threat, and that commenter gets a beating, is Lee culpable in the threat because he didn’t police his comments? Or is he liable because he didn’t alert the authorities to a threat he should have taken action on?
This measure of “civility” just sounds like a way to attack a blog you don’t like because of their political orientation.
The last bit of the piece is telling:
Mr. O’Reilly said the guidelines were not about censorship. “That is one of the mistakes a lot of people make — believing that uncensored speech is the most free, when in fact, managed civil dialogue is actually the freer speech,” he said. “Free speech is enhanced by civility.”
I have to scratch my head at that comment. Is he actually saying that speech under the Soviets was more free than speech in the United States?
Let me amend his comments. Civil speech is designed to communicate ideas in an intelligent fashion. Impolitic speech is designed to insult and communicate distaste.
More: Captain’s Quarters
So you think that 1.0 Gig memory thumbdrive is the coolest thing since sliced bread? Well, check this out.
Drudge has a link to this story about the Nectstraininator, or 360 degree view machine.
I can just imagine the HS teacher saying “All my kids have giant neck muscles.”
Over at Playfuls.com, they have an opinion piece on MS Vista, the latest operating system to roll out of Redmond. The piece centers on Vista’s security applications, and it frets that Microsoft will become the new security giant, and other security companies, like Macafee and Symantec, will be left to wither on the vine.
The author makes one big assumption: that Vista secuirty will actually work.
Ever since Win98, I’ve been skeptical of any promises MS makes. The first release of Win98 was such a disaster it’s hard to think any of their “first-run” products could ever do well.
The author over at Playfuls also rips into XP, and I have to call an exception here: XP is WORLDS better than 2000, ME, NT, 98, or 95. It runs smoothly. I especially like the “protected” systems, where if one crashes, it’s not an insta-death for anything else you’re running (unless it’s explorer). Oddly, one program that manages to wreck my XP operating system is…. Word 2003. Yep. Almost every time I use it at home, it nukes the OS. I think I know what the problem is (incompatability with Acrobat 5.0), but I am loathe to upgrade to Acrobat 6.0 simply because MS Office 2003 doesn’t want to deal with Acrobat 5.0. Suckorama.
The author also claims that Linux has less of a security problem than XP does. On the surface that is true. It’s also true that there’s a far smaller market share of Linux, so hackers, by proportionality, will spend less time on Linux because it’s not used nearly as much as Windows.
Which brings up the third variable: hackers. Hackers are persistent and clever, and regardless of what Vista presents, I’m sure that we’ll hear about viruses, worms, trojans, etc. that Vista is going to have to update. I think Symantec and Macafee are going to be at a disadvantage (they’ve been denied source code), but in about 6 months they’ll catch up and offer security alternatives to Vista.
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