If you haven’t heard yet, Google and Microsoft’s Bing are in a bit of a cold war. Yesterday, Google posted results of a series of experiments that confirm their suspicion that Bing had been “copying” their top query results.
In short, Google temporarily created about 100 “synthetic queries”. These synthetic queries would be strings that one would never expect a user to type such as “delhipublicschool40 chdjob” or “hiybbprqag”. Google would then insert as a top result a unique and real web page that had nothing to do with the query. In other words, the non-nonsensical string did not appear in the page nor were there any other indications that this real world web page should have any association to the strings.
Google engineers were then given laptops with fresh installs of both Windows, Internet Explorer 8 and the Bing Toolbar. They were then asked to query for those same strings.
Within a short time, the contrived top results that Google had placed started appearing as top results on Bing for the same queries!
Now the million dollar question…
Was this a sincere form of flattery? A clever idea? An indication that Bing is a cheap imitation? All of the above?
Hit us up in the comments with what you think!
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OK, so I was installing a new piece of server software today. It’s so great that many of these packages now have detailed HOW-TOs (usually in the form of some WIKI) for the lazy admin who just wants to get it up and running. Not that I’m usually lazy, but hey it’s a slow day between Christmas and New Years — I just want to get this installed … so I’m doing the “copy and paste from the HOW-TO thing”.
I came across this line:
“Next we have to create a database which <software> needs to store information:”
$ sudo mysql -u root
No problems, I’ve done that before. I dutifully type that into my shell not thinking much. This is what I get:
$ sudo mysql -u root
ERROR 1045 (28000): Access denied for user 'root'@'localhost' (using password: NO)
Hrmm. What the heck is “ERROR 1045″ ?! Googling it returns a whole bunch of strange answers.
Turns out this is partly a “RTFM” (read the fine manual) type problem, and partly a “depends how you have MySQL configured” problem. Anyway, if your system allows passwords to be specified at the command line, here is the solution:
You need to add a “-p” after to indicate that you wish MySQL to prompt you for a password.
Thus,
$ sudo mysql -u root -p
Enter password:
Hope this helps the next lazy admin googling it. :-)
Of late, I have been coding in C# using Visual Studio 2005. One day while merrily going about my way, I must have accidentally hit the Control key and some keys. A little known “feature” was discovered. All my spaces turned to “dots”. Apparently, this is called the visible whitespace feature. I’ve seen (and used) it in Word, but have never seen it in a code editor.
Unfortunately, my code became highly unreadable in this format. I tried looking through the dialogs to see if I could find ways to turn it off to no avail. Finally, I found this article to be of much help:
http://aspadvice.com/blogs/name/archive/2006/09/15/Visible-Whitespace-in-Visual-Studio.aspx
Ctrl-E-S does the trick apparently. It turns on and off this feature.
A nerdboys blogger blogging at 36103 feet going at 436 mph?! … seem impossible? Among some of the odder offerings of Virgin airlines (mood lighting, linux-powered in-flight consoles), they also offer in-flight WIFI.
…Continue reading » Flying with wifi
