Vote for Boot Land! External links Options

[Nuno Brito]

It's election time and Boot Land is currently ranked as #12 on the xmarks worldwide category for boot disks.

This hardly seems like a fair score.

Care to do something about it?

All you need to do is vote and write one or two words regarding what you think about this site.

Here is the site link:
http://www.xmarks.com/site/www.boot-land.net

Thank you!

[sanbarrow]

All you need to do is vote and write one or two words regarding what you think about this site.

Is a review like this wanted ?

"best content available - but the site is not easy to use and needs a lot of patience from the visitor"

Ulli

[Nuno Brito]

Put an honest review.

If that is your opinion and also the way how you'd like new visitors to be introduced on Boot Land, so let it be.

[sanbarrow]

No - I will not vote there - no use in discouraging new visitors ;-)

Also I would not give a cent for having a high rate on that site - have you seen that they list Hirens CD as number 3 in Boot-CD ?

[was_jaclaz]

It's election time and Boot Land is currently ranked as #12 on the xmarks worldwide category for boot disks.

Actually right now if you go to xmarks, and search for "bootdisk" or "bootdisks":
http://www.xmarks.com/topic/bootdisk
boot.land is #34 and there are two link, #19 and #33 for the "unameable" re-known WAREZ release site.

The #12 position is ONLY for "Boot Disks" (and the unnameable is #11)

I guess that the above tells enough about the dependability of such a source.

This hardly seems like a fair score.

Does it?

Exception made for the pre-made build by Amalux, I can see very few or no people (I mean among the same kind of morons real newbies that would actually trust such a mechanism), i.e. installing on their PC yet another perfectly unuseful program, actually succeeding in building a bootdisk using Winbuilder.

In all fairness, and notwithstanding the fact that I don't particularly like the "environment", UBCD and UBCD4WIN have much more merits when it comes to making a bootdisk.

We should vote for abolishing this kind of things, not encouraging/supprting or even mentioning them:
http://www.xmarks.com/about/company

About Us

Xmarks was founded in 2006 under our original name Foxmarks. Our bookmark sync browser add-on is one of the most popular in the world with over fourteen million downloads and counting. Xmarks is available as a free add-on for Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari (Mac OS) and can be downloaded here.

With the launch of Xmarks, we now offer an exciting new bookmark-powered web discovery service. Xmarks helps you uncover the best sites on the web based on what millions of people like you are bookmarking in their web browser. Our products are actively used in over three million browsers and we manage over half a billion bookmarks for our users. We extract anonymous information from that corpus of bookmarks to provide web site information and similar site recommendations.

Xmarks is a privately held startup backed by Redpoint Ventures. We are headquartered in a beautiful eco-friendly building in downtown San Francisco.

Our Discovery Technology

At its core, our discovery technology is powered by the hundreds of millions of bookmarks we manage for our users. By analyzing bookmarks we can determine the popularity of a web site based on how frequently it is bookmarked and what topics a site is about based on bookmark folders and tags. We also recommend similar sites based on how bookmarks are grouped into folders. We think of bookmarks as “votes”, and we’ve built some state-of-the art algorithms to effectively tally those votes to find the best sites across a wide range of topics.

Basically the idea is that the more people bookmark sites (which is called popularity, due to the fact that you do not know whether the one bookmarking is a total incompetent or not) the more you increase the popularity of the site, i.e. you have created a perfect self-referencing mechanism driven by the (normally and statistically proven to be mainly not knowing what they are doing) masses.

Popular comes from populus, and has TWO meanings, of which the second one is the one to be taken into account in this context:
http://thesaurus.reference.com/browse/popular
is ordinary:
http://thesaurus.reference.com/browse/ordinary
which again is has TWO meanings, of which the second is the one that applies:

#1 Main Entry: ordinary
Part of Speech: adjective
Definition: common, regular
Synonyms: accustomed, customary, established, everyday, familiar, frequent, general, habitual, humdrum*, natural, normal, popular, prevailing, public, quotidian, routine, run-of-the-mill, settled, standard, stock, traditional, typical, usual, wonted

#2 Main Entry: ordinary
Part of Speech: adjective
Definition: average; not distinctive
Synonyms: characterless, common, commonplace, conventional, dull, fair, familiar, garden variety, garden*, generic, habitual, homespun, household, humble, indifferent, inferior, mean, mediocre, modest, no great shakes, normal, pedestrian, plain, plastic, prosaic, quotidian, routine, run-of-the-mill, second-rate, simple, so-so, stereotyped, undistinguished, uneventful, unexceptional, uninspired, unmemorable, unnoteworthy, unpretentious, unremarkable, usual, vanilla, white-bread, workaday

Mechanisms like the xmarks are in my view simply methods to promote mediocrity.

At least in my view, that is EXACTLY the opposite of what boot-land and it's members are trying to do.

Popular is not necessarily an antonym of "good", but if it is not, it is because popularity CAME from being "good", not because a stupid bookmarking site rates it better or worse than another.

Someone put it nicely in the past:

Seek not the favor of the multitude; it is seldom got by honest and lawful means. But seek the testimony of few; and number not voices, but weigh them.

The truth, of course, is that a billion falsehoods told a billion times by a billion people are still false.

and of course, the only reason why I bring up this:
http://homepages.tesco.net/J.deBoynePollar...oolishness.html



jaclaz

[Nuno Brito]

Yes, all very valid arguments.

But the truth remains that the unnameable option will be listed on upper positions and obfuscate the efforts put into a legal solution.

This is the reason why such ranks matter if people never heard anything about unnameable vs legal solutions and will only trust on the reviews from other users.

[sanbarrow]

why not ask the folks at xmark why they rate warez so high ?

[was_jaclaz]

But the truth remains that the unnameable option will be listed on upper positions and obfuscate the efforts put into a legal solution.

That is not "the truth", that is how things go, which is different.

This is the reason why such ranks matter if people never heard anything about unnameable vs legal solutions and will only trust on the reviews from other users.

Yes, and that is the reason how we should take position AGAINST this kind of approach, by writing them asking to remove bookmarks to WAREZ that "pollute" results, mixing "rightful" and "good" sites, like UBCD, UBCD4WIN, 911CD and boot-land with "wrongful" ones.

Just imagine the outcome :

1. "xmarks.com accused to list Warez sites" (if the request is NOT - as it won't be - fulfilled)
2. "xmarks attempts at the freedom of the internet by removing popular sites from its ranking" (should - as it won't be - such request fulfilled)

Personally, I don't particularly "like" the DMCA and I personally find that most of the Trademark or Copyright holders fail to properly defend their intellectual properties, but even from the way the DMCA Notice is worded (as well as the "Third-Party Links":
http://www.xmarks.com/about/terms
they do not care a damn about what they "rate", they simply collect information from users (supposedly in anonymous and as aggregate data only ) and assemble them, this info is worth NOTHING, if not for statistical reasons, it is NOT a "directory" it is a form of search engine.

And this brings us back (or forward ) to Google:
http://homepages.tesco.net/J.deBoynePollar...ess-metric.html

Same concept apply, being highly ranked in xmarks is a meaningless metric, and for the reason exposed I won't personally contribute in any way to it.



jaclaz

[Nuno Brito]

why not ask the folks at xmark why they rate warez so high ?

It's the mainstream solution.

At least here in Portugal, it's a common practice to lend boot CD's instead of learning how they are done in the first place, which does make some sense if you're only looking for something that "works".

Asking to remove the unnameable software is also not a sense of fair competition. If Boot Land is to develop and present better solutions, they should compete against whatever is used in the real world to address these issues being legal or not.

If wb and other projects need to be worked to be simpler and readier for the main public, this is a nice incentive to keep up the good work.

[was_jaclaz]

If Boot Land is to develop and present better solutions, they should compete against whatever is used in the real world to address these issues being legal or not.

As much as "hard work" has to be, to be fair following your approach, valued the same as "stealing".

I don't see why "being cruel to animals" (or "torturing human beings") can't be put on the same level of "caressing a little furry creature" or "helping your next to kin".

I presume that torture is a pretty effective means of getting informations and definitely surclasses simply "asking a few questions", when it comes to results.

And it is also used a lot all over the world, (read as "it's a popular way to get what you want") but this shouldn't allow for "competing" with it through "persuasive questioning", because you would lose anyway.

Before you will accuse me of comparing apples with oranges, let's make another example, less extreme.

It is "mainstream" or "popular" in many countries to litter the streets with paper, chewing gums, and what not.

Does this mean that because everyone else does that (and yes, it "works" much better than putting that in your pockets and wait until you find a wastebin) youshould not refrain form dirtying the street?

As said in some other place, we have a lot of sticks and a lot of sand, it's a personal choice to draw lines (and later avoid crossing them) or not.

If wb and other projects need to be worked to be simpler and readier for the main public, this is a nice incentive to keep up the good work.

.... waiter come taste this soup....



jaclaz