If Brin and Page are losing interest in managing Google, it's none too soon. This is a company that desperately needs to grow up. It has no collective attention span: dozens of kewl new projects keep appearing, but nobody can ever be bothered with the boring work of making them in actual products.
OK, B&P wanted to found a company that did things differently. Good for them. But to do anything at all, and organization has to have follow-through. It has to balance all the creative geniuses with the dedicated, boring sloggers that get things out the door.
Indeed, in the 80s, lots of companies hopped on the alternative energy bandwagon. Exxon seemed to be operating on the assumption that they'd be out of the oil business soon. They bought into high tech in a big way, including the company I was working for. One person I met from another Exxon subsidiary talked about new battery technology they were working on. This was supposed to be a new business for all those Exxon gas stations that soon wouldn't have any gas: swapping out depleted batteries in electric cars.
Then oil prices came back down, those batteries turned out to be harder to design than they thought, and Exxon discovered they weren't very good at managing high tech. Back to business as usual. And here we are again...
A Jew, a Christian, and a Moslem meet on the train. "Silverstein!" says the Jew. "Who's your friend?" "His name's Abdullah," replies the Moslem, "but he's no friend of mine since he converted!"
First of all, it spells an end to multi-booting. I have erased my secondary OSs and I run them in VMs under my main system.
Well, yes, if you're a geek who likes to play with a dozen OSs, you'd much rather open on a new VM then reboot your machine. But as usual, we're confusing geekworld with the real world. The use of desktop VMs is pretty limited outside geekworld — mostly Mac folks who have one or two Windows apps they can't live without. That doesn't do a lot to explain why so many heavy hitters are interested in the technology.
Secondly, just think of the possibility to move server images from a physical server to another one, literally freezing it here and awakening it over there...
Cloning systems is hardly new. Of course that's different from what you're talking about, which is cloning a running system. Still, is that really something you have to do very often?
Is it just a trend...
Of course it's a trend. I won't play language nazi here. I'll just suggest that everybody stop and think about how they've heard "trend" used in other contexts. I think the word PCM2 was looking for was "fad".
And of course it's not a fad. There are already a lot of server farms out there that are highly dependent on virtualization. It allows them to provide specific OSs, and even OS versions (notice that Sun is mainly interested in letting folks run multiple versions of Solaris), without dedicating a machine to each installation. Less expensive, more flexible. No big mystery there.
And it's not even a new idea, though this particular implementation of it is. For years, supercomputer companies have sold software that divided their multiprocessor systems into "cells", each running its own OS. Virtualization is pretty much the same thing, only it doesn't require a dedicated CPU — or the purchase of an expensive supercomputer.
Which is why they ban every payment service they don't own. With the minor exceptions of Allpay.net, Bidpay, Canadian Tire Money, cash2india, CertaPay, Checkfree.com, hyperwallet,com, Moneybookers.com, Ozpay.biz, Payko.com, Paymate.com.au, Propay.com, and XOOM.
Home PCs are far more powerful than the average user needs. This has been the case for a long, long time.
Perfectly true, but...
Even Microsoft is having trouble saturating medium end computers that dell sells for the $900US mark.
Or even low-end computers that white box companies sell for $300. However, note that Vista will require at least $2K worth of hardware to get "the full experience".
I'm getting really sick of this "software as a service" crud, but at the same time, I'm also getting scared that companies might actually convince the mainsteam to use it. It would spell the end of privacy and anonymity for users and massively increase the power of already too powerful corporations and governments.
How would that be different from the current situation? Most PCs are thoroughly infested with spyware. And even if your home computer is secure, all your electronic transactions have to go through the very shared systems you're so wary of.
You can't protect your privacy by refusing to accept new technologies. That ship sailed the day bookkeepers threw out their ledgers and started using computers. If you want privacy, force the people who process your data to obey privacy protocols. If you can't (or won't) do that, you're screwed, no matter where your OS lives.
Ken Lay is about a thousand times worse than a pedophile.
Why? Because he ripped off thousands of people? The severity of the crime is a factor. Tell me, would you rather be raped, or have all your money stolen?
You make it sound like a believable death PROVES there's nothing more to it.
Only if you interpet what I was saying as an attempt to "prove" something one way or the other. Not every argument is about proof. Mine was just about poking a hole in a fallacious assertion.
You hear hoofbeats, you think horses, not zebras — assuming you live in Texas and not Kenya. The fact that you're not in Kenya doesn't prove that there aren't any zebras outside — it just sets a higher level of evidence. When somebody says, "I knew there were Zebras in Texas!" it's reasonable to demand that they show you some stripes.
The only measure of a crime is how many people are affected? Yeah, right. So if I steal the life savings of 1,000 people, I'm worse than somebody who, say, tortures 10 children to death. Yeah, that's logical.
Right, Lay was evil. We're all agreed. But get a fucking grip. Save some of your outrage for people who are really evil. Ripping off the savings of people, no matter how many, is not the worst crime in the world. There are people out there who kill and maim for no good reason, or even just for the fun of it. That doesn't excuse people who just steal, but you're an asshole if you don't develop a sense of proportion about their crimes.
Go fuck yourself and your straw man too. I never said Lay's crimes didn't have any victims. I didn't even say he wasn't evil. I just said that there are people more evil than him.
Lay stole people's money. That's bad, especially when its the savings of ordinary working people who had worked and sacrificed to make a better future for themselves. But these folks will survive — they'll just be less prosperous.
My condemnation of pedophiles has nothing to do with "gut feeling". If I went by that rule, I'd condemn many activities between consenting adults that I find personally repulsive but morally inoffensive. I just happen to believe that hurting a child is worse than hurting an adult. You're not just doing a person harm, you're stealing that person's whole life.
Jeez. OK, the guy was pure evil. Because of him, hundreds of Enron employees lost their retirement funds, and thousands of investors got screwed. Not to mention his role in the great energy "deregulation" scam. I'm just sorry he didn't live long enough to do time.
But there are people who are even more evil, believe it or not. Even a garden-variety pedophile is worse.
Sure, nobody just keels over and dies from a heart attack. That never happens. And anybody who talks about "stress factors" like being pilloried in front of millions of people or facing spending the rest of his life in prison, is just spreading misinformation. And if you mention the fact that he was in his 60s, you've just got your head up your ass.
I read this in a novel set in Louisiana, which I gather is famous for its mosquitos. A guy is lying in bed, and he hears two musquitos arguing. He shudders when he realizes that they're arguing about him: "I don't want to eat him here. Let's take him home." "No! If we try to move him, the big guys will take him away from us!"
There's more to air pollution than soot. I grew up in the L.A. basin, and never saw any soot particles. But my lungs were permanently damaged by less obvious pollutants: nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide, ozone. L.A. has gotten much better since I left, but only because of strict vehicle emission laws. Athens is said to be working on that too, but I believe it's still pretty bad.
Anyway, I think insects are a lot more resistant to air pollution than humans.
There probably are bank robbers who are addicted to what they do. The concept of "addiction" is just a model for understanding destructive behavior. It's not an attempt to excuse it. In fact, the opposite is true: people who are fighting addiction, and the people who help them (often addicts themselves) will tell you that the worst thing you can do for an addict is overlook his or her misdeeds.
Granted, a launch is the controlled ignition of the largest bottle rocket ever made, and that's dangerous. But isn't the primary concern these days the foam breaking off of the fuel tank and damaging heat tiles, which don't matter until re-entry?
Well, we've had two catastrophic failures, and one of them was at launch. The launches are supposed to be safe now, but they were also supposed to be safe before Challenger blew up.
Post again when it's touched down on earth safely, please.
No, post again when you have a vehicle with an acceptable failure rate. This vehicle has failed repeatedly, and twice killed it crew in the process. If you're serious about space travel, you shouldn't be cheering on this abortion of a space vehicle. You should be lobbying for funding for something that works.
I'm arguing that when it is a much more targeted device, capable of doing MUCH less than a laptop can do, then the price should reflect this. $299 would be fine.
Suprise: I completely agree with you. (Except I might even go as high as $299.95.) So this device goes for about 2½ times what most consumers would pay for it. Which is about par for early-adopter products.
When I compared this device to a laptop, I wasn't comparing it to what a laptop can do, but what people use them for. And a big chunk of that is just sitting around and reading shit. OK, you can't play Heroes of M&M on it — but not everybody needs to do that.
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OK, B&P wanted to found a company that did things differently. Good for them. But to do anything at all, and organization has to have follow-through. It has to balance all the creative geniuses with the dedicated, boring sloggers that get things out the door.
You're quite correct. However, that doesn't explain why this is being filed under "your rights online". Just because lawyers are involved?
Then oil prices came back down, those batteries turned out to be harder to design than they thought, and Exxon discovered they weren't very good at managing high tech. Back to business as usual. And here we are again...
A Jew, a Christian, and a Moslem meet on the train. "Silverstein!" says the Jew. "Who's your friend?" "His name's Abdullah," replies the Moslem, "but he's no friend of mine since he converted!"
And of course it's not a fad. There are already a lot of server farms out there that are highly dependent on virtualization. It allows them to provide specific OSs, and even OS versions (notice that Sun is mainly interested in letting folks run multiple versions of Solaris), without dedicating a machine to each installation. Less expensive, more flexible. No big mystery there.
And it's not even a new idea, though this particular implementation of it is. For years, supercomputer companies have sold software that divided their multiprocessor systems into "cells", each running its own OS. Virtualization is pretty much the same thing, only it doesn't require a dedicated CPU — or the purchase of an expensive supercomputer.
Which is why they ban every payment service they don't own. With the minor exceptions of Allpay.net, Bidpay, Canadian Tire Money, cash2india, CertaPay, Checkfree.com, hyperwallet,com, Moneybookers.com, Ozpay.biz, Payko.com, Paymate.com.au, Propay.com, and XOOM.
Well, if the FBI's IT security is so screwed up that a dictionary attack actually works, then there's plenty of moronity to go around.
(Jeez.) OK then, would you rather have your savings stolen, or your children molested?
How would that be different from the current situation? Most PCs are thoroughly infested with spyware. And even if your home computer is secure, all your electronic transactions have to go through the very shared systems you're so wary of.
You can't protect your privacy by refusing to accept new technologies. That ship sailed the day bookkeepers threw out their ledgers and started using computers. If you want privacy, force the people who process your data to obey privacy protocols. If you can't (or won't) do that, you're screwed, no matter where your OS lives.
You hear hoofbeats, you think horses, not zebras — assuming you live in Texas and not Kenya. The fact that you're not in Kenya doesn't prove that there aren't any zebras outside — it just sets a higher level of evidence. When somebody says, "I knew there were Zebras in Texas!" it's reasonable to demand that they show you some stripes.
The only measure of a crime is how many people are affected? Yeah, right. So if I steal the life savings of 1,000 people, I'm worse than somebody who, say, tortures 10 children to death. Yeah, that's logical.
Right, Lay was evil. We're all agreed. But get a fucking grip. Save some of your outrage for people who are really evil. Ripping off the savings of people, no matter how many, is not the worst crime in the world. There are people out there who kill and maim for no good reason, or even just for the fun of it. That doesn't excuse people who just steal, but you're an asshole if you don't develop a sense of proportion about their crimes.
Go fuck yourself and your straw man too. I never said Lay's crimes didn't have any victims. I didn't even say he wasn't evil. I just said that there are people more evil than him.
Lay stole people's money. That's bad, especially when its the savings of ordinary working people who had worked and sacrificed to make a better future for themselves. But these folks will survive — they'll just be less prosperous.
My condemnation of pedophiles has nothing to do with "gut feeling". If I went by that rule, I'd condemn many activities between consenting adults that I find personally repulsive but morally inoffensive. I just happen to believe that hurting a child is worse than hurting an adult. You're not just doing a person harm, you're stealing that person's whole life.
Is this a source of rivalry between Minnesota and Lousiana?
But there are people who are even more evil, believe it or not. Even a garden-variety pedophile is worse.
Sure, nobody just keels over and dies from a heart attack. That never happens. And anybody who talks about "stress factors" like being pilloried in front of millions of people or facing spending the rest of his life in prison, is just spreading misinformation. And if you mention the fact that he was in his 60s, you've just got your head up your ass.
I read this in a novel set in Louisiana, which I gather is famous for its mosquitos. A guy is lying in bed, and he hears two musquitos arguing. He shudders when he realizes that they're arguing about him: "I don't want to eat him here. Let's take him home." "No! If we try to move him, the big guys will take him away from us!"
Anyway, I think insects are a lot more resistant to air pollution than humans.
There probably are bank robbers who are addicted to what they do. The concept of "addiction" is just a model for understanding destructive behavior. It's not an attempt to excuse it. In fact, the opposite is true: people who are fighting addiction, and the people who help them (often addicts themselves) will tell you that the worst thing you can do for an addict is overlook his or her misdeeds.
Suprise: I completely agree with you. (Except I might even go as high as $299.95.) So this device goes for about 2½ times what most consumers would pay for it. Which is about par for early-adopter products.
When I compared this device to a laptop, I wasn't comparing it to what a laptop can do, but what people use them for. And a big chunk of that is just sitting around and reading shit. OK, you can't play Heroes of M&M on it — but not everybody needs to do that.