Yeah, right. And if you believe that, you probably also believe that professors carefully choose the textbook that will be most beneficial to their students.
From TFA:
"During a meeting of the Committee on Undergraduate Education last March, Petersen proposed creating a centralized database of ISBN numbers for all courses, streamlining the process for professors and cutting the costs for the Coop. The proposal, which could have also made it easier for Crimson Reading to collect information, was nixed."
'"There's a very lucrative and sensitive relationship between the Coop and University Hall that is stopping students from saving money on textbooks," Hadfield said.'
As we all known, college textbooks have been corrupt for a long, long time. It actually makes me think that we ought to move to a "pharmacy" model, where the book stores must be independent from the colleges, just as the dispensing of drugs is separate from the prescribing doctor to prevent this kind of corruption.
Of course, you couldn't do anything about private universities, but the government could implement this for public universities, and hopefully shame the private ones into going along.
If Harvard is going to these extremes such as this to prevent people from copying down a few numbers in the bookstore, you know they're corrupt to the core. Clearly they've long abandonded their mission of being a place of higher learning. Of course, the whole Ivy League's been running on reputation for a long time.
Because, frankly, I find it unlikely that you've read that many books in twelve years.
"Thousands and thousands" might make it sound exaggerated, if I had to pin a number on it, I'd say probably 2,000 books. I'm 42 years old. I used to read a *LOT* of books, and I read fairly fast (60-80 pages an hour, not the fastest, but a reasonable clip). So I can easily whip out a typical paperback book in an evening. I've actually not read nearly as much the last 10 years (once I got married and had kids -- go figure). So between, say, age 15 and 32 was probably my highest output. At one time, around age 25, I counted 1,200 books in my personal library. I've bought a lot since then, and I used to check out a lot of books from the library. Unfortunately, I lost the majority of my library in a flooded house, and I've gotten rid of a lot as well. Still have big bookcases full, though.
So figure 1,900 books between 15 and 32 -- 17 years. That's 111 / year, or 2.1 per week. Not exactly that difficult to imagine. Heck, thinking about that average, it might be more than 2K. A few years ago I read the Hornblower series in about a week and a half, that's 11 books right there.
You've never read writing that felt like wading through molasses like Tolkien? Ever read Cervantes? "A Brief History of England"? Any organic chemistry book? Or any of the thousands of published authors who, in fact, are worse writers than Tolkien? If you have the authority you claim, you'd never put Tolkien at the bottom.
First of all, I'm speaking of fiction (I haven't read Cervantes). I don't necessarily put Tolkien at the bottom in terms of literary "value", I put him near the bottom in terms of readability. There are lots of bad authors that I've managed to get through -- bad plots, bad grammar, bad characters. Hell, Larry Niven, as good as his ideas are, wouldn't know a character if the cardboard hit him on the head. But his books are *readable*.
Tolkien's prose is heavy and ponderous. Obviously there are people who manage to get through it, but it just defeats me. I simply don't like having to work that hard, no matter how cool the world is. I reject the idea that his books have to be that way. You seem to think that Tolkien has no flaws, but *every* author has flaws in some way. Heinlein was preachy and often ridiculously sexist. Etc, etc.
I love good stories. I've read books, watched movies and tv shows, listened to my grandmother's tales and a good story is a good story. You know it's good because it takes you to another place and you cherish the experience when it's over, period.
Agreed. Don't we all love those stories?
Tolkien does this better than the vast majority of published storytellers.
However, I disagree with this.
Next time, just say you don't like his writing style.
You can say that about any poorly written book. At what point do you not apologize for the guy? Look, I admire the plot and scope of the books. But I don't buy that it was necessary to be so ponderous and dull so often in his writing. I've read thousands and thousands of books in my life, and there have only been a handful of times that I couldn't finish a book that I really wanted to finish.
Hell, I'm a huge fan of Michener's work, and lord knows he takes a long time to set up his plots. So I'm not impatient, I'm willing to cut an author some slack. But never has any writing felt like wading through molasses like Tolkien.
A great book should also flow such that the words never get in the way.
Well, to be more accurate, Tolkien knew how to construct a plot. As far as actually "telling a story", the man pretty much stunk up the page. His prose is so dry and boring and hard to read that I've never been able to finish the books. I know I'm not alone in finding his writing unbearable.
And you sound like a despicable control freak who doesn't understand that he has no right to control the life of another person.
Of course I have the right to control the life of my kids until they become adults. That's why they're called kids, and not adults. By your theory, a seven year old should be able to decide he doesn't want to go to school anymore because he'd rather play video games all day. After all, who are you to control his life? Just as I would "control" (to use your word) my five year old, so I will "control" my 17 year old. Of course, the 17 year old has more privileges and freedom than the five year old, but it's still subject to my supervision. How much freedom is dependent on their maturity and how much trust they've earned.
Of course, you do realize that by making this post, you've pretty much guaranteed that fate will deal you the most unreasonable, jerky teenager imaginable.:) I'm sure when he wants to hang around the druggies and take heroin all day, you'll give your hearty approval for him living his own life. Or when your daughter brings home a different boyfriend to sleep in your house every night, you won't try to "control" her behavior. You certainly wouldn't want to violate their rights!
And then what, send him to boot camp? And then juvie? and finally prison? All because he wanted a little respect?
If you want respect, then you have to show respect.
ou are a horrible human being and a worse parent. Your attitude manufactures more problems than it solves.
No, my attitude solves the problems early on so I don't have to resort to extreme tactics. There are three kinds of screwed up children: parents that are too tight, parents that are too loose, and screw-ups no matter what kind a parent. You would probably accuse me of being the too tight parent, but I'm not. They get certain privileges. But if they lie to me or go behind my back, or otherwise betray trust, they need to know that the there will be major consequences to that -- just as there are in the real world.
I know, I know -- the horror of not allowing a teenager to do whatever the hell they want, whenever the hell they want! The horror of parents that actually parent their children! The horror of insisting on high standards of behavior!
The real world seems to be working out quite nicely for me right now.
Yeah, I can tell you're reeeeeeaaaaalllllyyyy well adjusted. --rolls eyes--
And just to answer your other whiny, childish "Well, I'll just [blah blah]" statements, just because you apparently had weak parents who didn't know how to fix a f***-up like yourself, doesn't mean that it's impossible. It's about identifying what you want, and taking it away until you learn to stop being a selfish jerk. It's really that simple. No friends, no privacy, no computer. And as another poster pointed out, Military School would be a definite option.
Anyway, most of your B.S. above is mere posturing. I highly doubt you're the badass rebel you're trying to make us think you are.
It's a shame your parents gave up on you. Hopefully you'll figure things out someday.
In other words if I was being monitored by my parents I'd have simply found a way to make sure they can't see what I'm doing. At worst I'd have told them to f-off and challenged them to do something about it.
You sound like you were a spoiled brat whose parents needed to give a serious attitude adjustment. I would've taken away your computer for a couple of weeks if you spoke to me like that (or if you bypassed my measures), probably along with your cellphone, your ipod and all your music. And if you still had a bad attitude, I'd take your door off the hinges. If you STILL didn't get it, I'd come to school with you and follow you around, making sure your friends saw you, until you begged for mercy.
Your links aren't working, but I'm assuming you're talking about the XBox. If Apple had a gaming platform, we could compare them, but they don't. I was specifically thinking of Windows Mobile, which is very open and easy to develop for.
Now, I KNOW what my account name is but you HAVE to admit that Apple's use of the greater software community pwns Microsoft who regularly attracts NEGATIVE hacking.
Well, the primary difference is that Microsoft doesn't enforce jack-booted control over their devices, so you don't *have* to hack them to do positive things.
I recently bought an iPhone (I really need to do a journal entry about this), and it's so good that it actually makes me hate Apple even more than I have in the past. The idiots over there cripple it so badly and in such stupid ways. It's absolutely maddening. And I never thought I'd find an application that I hate more than Quicktime, but iTunes is the WORST freaking music manager I could even imagine. God, it is a buggy, terrible piece of garbage. (Maybe they're better on the Mac than on Windows where I use it, but you'd think the interface would be the same)
I definitely need to post my iPhone review and let out some of this frustration.:)
Search engines were not only obvious, they were old hat, the battles already fought and decided, when Google appeared on the scene.
Indeed... which makes their success and utter domination all the more remarkable.
Google's "breakthrough" was being fast through distributed search, which is something that all the search engines were working on for some time.
What? I used a lot of search engines prior to Google, in fact, I still have them bookmarked: AltaVista, Excite, HotBot, MSN, Northern Light, Yahoo, etc. I used to search a variety of them because each one seemed to do better at various results. After Google appeared, I gradually stopped using them all, because Google consistently gave better results.
I don't recall Google being any faster than any of them. They all gave pretty much instantaneous results.
But the difference between "quite successful" and "super-rich" is luck, not hard work.
I might agree that the difference between "rich" and "super-rich" is mostly luck. And certainly some people get rich by attaching themselves to the right people (e.g., become one of the first 10 employees of an eventually huge IPO). But by and large, to be rich, you have to want to be rich and dedicate your thinking to that goal, and take the appropriate risks, and try again when you fail.
The google founders weren't smarter or harder-working than a hundred other people.
The issue isn't necessarily raw intelligence or level of hard work. Take 100 smart people and put them in the same situation as the Google guys. Would they fall into the same riches? I'd say "no". Technology isn't everything! You have to be able to work with people, give up control where necessary, take control when necessary, on and on. For example, Theo de Raadt is a smart, hard-working guy. Assuming he was motivated to do it, could he have created Google? Not just the search engine, the whole enchilada. Not a chance in hell, because he's an abrasive psycho.
Creating a successful company takes a lot of broad skills. There's a reason that 90% of start-ups fail.
All the very rich people I know worked about as hard as most of my successful friends.
A ditch digger works hard. It's not just about working "hard", it's about working on the right things.
They didn't have any magic technology at hand but they were unique compared to their competition in that they had enough resources to demo their early work.
Almost everything looks obvious after the fact. The wheel is "obvious", yet very few cultures actually invented it.
The fact that Google is *still* the best search engine ought to tell you something about the difficulty.
Most what is now considered their innovation was all discussed on usenet news groups long before their research was done.
Talk is cheap, and ideas are cheaper. The devil is in the details.
I know lots of others others who worked hard and had it all destroyed by bad luck.
There's no such thing as bad luck. *Everybody* encounters bad luck. There is only lack of preparation for disaster and lack for foresight for consequences.
Re:The Windows 386 Promo Video is better.
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DOS 5 Upgrade Video
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Good God. At times like this watching both these videos, I'm reminded of a famous quote by Steve Jobs (paraphrase): The biggest problem with Microsoft is that they have no taste.
I've found that a great many of the people who criticize and dismiss RMS are often people who make extensive use of GNU tools -- I think it's worth taking a moment every now and again to consider what kind of FOSS world we'd have right now if it weren't for RMS and his mates.
I didn't realize that by using his tools, I'm obligated to agree with everything he says.
RMS has gotten sufficient accolades for writing some software, and providing a structure for open source software -- in the past. Lately, he hasn't done a hell of a lot except irritate people.
The ironic part is, Word needs master documents, since it cannot reliably handle documents longer than about 40 pages.
Sheesh. I've used Word with docs hundreds of pages long dozens of times. I can only remember one document that I had trouble with, and that had a huge number of embedded files all over the place.
Gah, I bought one. $299 is like, almost reasonable, which is something new for Apple. This is actually the first money I've given Apple since 1984, when I bought an original Mac because it was neat. And the iPhone is the first Apple product since then actually was cool enough to temp me. But the $500 price tag made it out of the question.
But $299... damn it, it's probably worth $299, especially if people succeed in hacking apps onto it (particularly ssh).
*sigh* Oh well, I guess giving Apple money once every 23 years won't kill me. Hey Steve, see you in 2030!
So, saying economic collapse is the end of civilisation only serves to demonstrate your pathetically myopic notion of what it is to be "civilised" and what "civilisation" consists in and of.
Sheesh. What's extremely apparent here is that you have absolutely no idea what the word "economics" means.
Gads, you ARE an Idiot. And a Narcissist. Do yourself a big fat favour: learn how to grow your own food. And learn some analogue skills, like darning your own socks and repairing your own shirts. Some carpentry skills would be good, and a good collection of high quality hand tools for that would be wise. And learn to cook on a wood stove. Get all that together, and you'll survive OK in a small town.
You know what's really sad about this? It's that this is a big fantasy to you. You want to see the "arrogant narcissists" finally brought down, finally get what they deserve for daring to use up a limited resource. The bastards! You chortle and can't wait for the big day when we will be reduced to bronze-age farmers.
This isn't about science and mathematics to you, it's a religion. Just like some fundamentalist, you want the Earth God to smite those who dare to use resources! You *want* a harsh life, to prove your purity. No one should have luxuries, we should all live Puritan lifestyles. Look at the hellfire you've been spewing in this thread, all the insults and hatred.
"I say unto you, some day the SUV drivers shall be cast into the lake of fire, to burn in eternal damnation!"
Sorry, but it just ain't gonna happen. Like I said in another post, it's a mathematical certainty that we will not have an economic collapse of any kind. The switchover cost will be amortized over decades. It will be a gradual process of parts of the world economies switching over. It simply won't happen fast enough to have significant effects, much less the ridiculous notion of everyone reduced to growing our own food and repairing my own shirts.
Thanks for confirming that you aren't even bothering to read my posts. Some other dude said that, asshat. Pay attention.
Oops, sorry about that. When I have two people screaming and insulting me with basically the same ill-considered arguments while answering each other's posts, it gets confusing.
We will not magically just switch over to the alternatives. The in-between time is going to be full of, you guessed it, problems.
Sure there's going to be problems. And...? When aren't there problems with everything in the world? But mostly it'll be a pretty smooth transition.
Pay attention: I'm not a doom-and-gloomer.
LOL. This from the man who just said, and I quote, "We are completely and utterly fucked - I think the next 50 years is going to see an economic collapse of epic proportions..."
Nice way to contradict yourself. If that's not gloom and doom to you, I'd hate to see what you consider a gloomy outlook!
Oh, and did you just compare y2k to the peak oil problem? Hilarious. You need a little more of what you purport to sell...
Yeah, I did. It was EXACTLY the same. I had EXACTLY the same debate with all the same predictions of economic collapse. I don't know, maybe you weren't around then, but it only seems like a trivial comparison because Y2K is *perceived* to be such a letdown joke. But it wasn't... hundreds of billions of dollars were spent to fix it, most of it at the last minute.
The Peak Oil problem is only a problem if you think the world can't adapt. It's actually not as big a problem as Y2K, in a sense... Y2K had an absolute deadline. Once we being the oil decline, we'll have decades to fix it. Ironically, as more and more people switch to different energy sources, we'll actually see a decline in oil prices, because of the lack of demand. Then it will start to rise again because of supply, then it will fall because of demand, then...
But let me guess... you think supply and demand is a bunch of nonsense.
It is a mathematical certainty that Peak Oil will not cause a massive economic crisis. The switchover will be amortized over decades.
And your central point, at best, is vaporware. Hope is not a strategy. What are ya, George Bush?
Nope. No hope required, only facts and logic. It is simply factual that alternatives to oil exist, such as oil shale and Thermal Depolymerization. Not to mention coal, which is not ideal, but it does exist. As well as nuclear power. Hell, if the crisis gets bad enough, maybe we'll actually start doing breeder reactors. And it is simply logical that if oil gets sufficiently more expensive than the alternatives, then we'll simply switch to the alternatives. Economics 101, my friend.
You might remember the last TEOTWAWKI crisis, the Y2K problem. It *was* a gigantic problem that, if it went unfixed, would've caused untold economic crisis. But once again, the world is not static. Things change if they *have* to change. And massive changes to our infrastructure were made pretty much invisibly to the outer world.
We will change over to the alternate technologies because we *have* to change. Why don't we change now? Why should we? (Relatively) cheap oil still exists. Not as cheap as it once was, but not crisis level expensive.
Gloom and doomers like you really, really need to take some economics classes. It's not just about money; economics reveals many truths. The world is not static. The world changes and adapts. If there were no other workable alternatives, then you could accuse me of 'hope and pray' beliefs. But there are numerous alternatives, all waiting their economic turn.
I never said anything about "Civilisation breaking down". Economic Collapse? Yes. I said that. End of Civilisation? No. I did not say that.
In my world, "economic collapse" means "civilization breaking down".
Anyway, the fact that you have to scream at me with frothing anger, with little actual rebuttal of my central point*, should tell you that you're not thinking clearly about the issue.
(*the central point, since you missed it, is that other tech will naturally take over in a gradual way.)
Maybe they'll find out that children's farts magically cleave ordinary mud and rock into equal parts sweet crude and distilled water, but until then, all we'll be doing is running up an ever-accelerating escalator.
No magic is required for this. Really. All of the gloom and doom scenerios assume a static world -- if oil vanished tomorrow, we'd be screwed. Or if technological advancement suddenly stopped, we'd be screwed. Well, duh. But it's not a static world, and never has been.
Mark my words: when cheap oil starts to permanently climb in price (whenever it happens), some new technology will "suddenly" appear, and the gloom-and-doomers will say, "But, but, but, we *would've* been screwed if inexpensive [xxx] hadn't appeared!! We were right at the time!! How could we have predicted inexpensive [xxx]???"
Slashdot Mirror
The Coop is not affiliated with Harvard.
Yeah, right. And if you believe that, you probably also believe that professors carefully choose the textbook that will be most beneficial to their students.
From TFA:
"During a meeting of the Committee on Undergraduate Education last March, Petersen proposed creating a centralized database of ISBN numbers for all courses, streamlining the process for professors and cutting the costs for the Coop. The proposal, which could have also made it easier for Crimson Reading to collect information, was nixed."
'"There's a very lucrative and sensitive relationship between the Coop and University Hall that is stopping students from saving money on textbooks," Hadfield said.'
As we all known, college textbooks have been corrupt for a long, long time. It actually makes me think that we ought to move to a "pharmacy" model, where the book stores must be independent from the colleges, just as the dispensing of drugs is separate from the prescribing doctor to prevent this kind of corruption.
Of course, you couldn't do anything about private universities, but the government could implement this for public universities, and hopefully shame the private ones into going along.
If Harvard is going to these extremes such as this to prevent people from copying down a few numbers in the bookstore, you know they're corrupt to the core. Clearly they've long abandonded their mission of being a place of higher learning. Of course, the whole Ivy League's been running on reputation for a long time.
Because, frankly, I find it unlikely that you've read that many books in twelve years.
"Thousands and thousands" might make it sound exaggerated, if I had to pin a number on it, I'd say probably 2,000 books. I'm 42 years old. I used to read a *LOT* of books, and I read fairly fast (60-80 pages an hour, not the fastest, but a reasonable clip). So I can easily whip out a typical paperback book in an evening. I've actually not read nearly as much the last 10 years (once I got married and had kids -- go figure). So between, say, age 15 and 32 was probably my highest output. At one time, around age 25, I counted 1,200 books in my personal library. I've bought a lot since then, and I used to check out a lot of books from the library. Unfortunately, I lost the majority of my library in a flooded house, and I've gotten rid of a lot as well. Still have big bookcases full, though.
So figure 1,900 books between 15 and 32 -- 17 years. That's 111 / year, or 2.1 per week. Not exactly that difficult to imagine. Heck, thinking about that average, it might be more than 2K. A few years ago I read the Hornblower series in about a week and a half, that's 11 books right there.
You've never read writing that felt like wading through molasses like Tolkien? Ever read Cervantes? "A Brief History of England"? Any organic chemistry book? Or any of the thousands of published authors who, in fact, are worse writers than Tolkien? If you have the authority you claim, you'd never put Tolkien at the bottom.
First of all, I'm speaking of fiction (I haven't read Cervantes). I don't necessarily put Tolkien at the bottom in terms of literary "value", I put him near the bottom in terms of readability. There are lots of bad authors that I've managed to get through -- bad plots, bad grammar, bad characters. Hell, Larry Niven, as good as his ideas are, wouldn't know a character if the cardboard hit him on the head. But his books are *readable*.
Tolkien's prose is heavy and ponderous. Obviously there are people who manage to get through it, but it just defeats me. I simply don't like having to work that hard, no matter how cool the world is. I reject the idea that his books have to be that way. You seem to think that Tolkien has no flaws, but *every* author has flaws in some way. Heinlein was preachy and often ridiculously sexist. Etc, etc.
I love good stories. I've read books, watched movies and tv shows, listened to my grandmother's tales and a good story is a good story. You know it's good because it takes you to another place and you cherish the experience when it's over, period.
Agreed. Don't we all love those stories?
Tolkien does this better than the vast majority of published storytellers.
However, I disagree with this.
Next time, just say you don't like his writing style.
You can say that about any poorly written book. At what point do you not apologize for the guy? Look, I admire the plot and scope of the books. But I don't buy that it was necessary to be so ponderous and dull so often in his writing. I've read thousands and thousands of books in my life, and there have only been a handful of times that I couldn't finish a book that I really wanted to finish.
Hell, I'm a huge fan of Michener's work, and lord knows he takes a long time to set up his plots. So I'm not impatient, I'm willing to cut an author some slack. But never has any writing felt like wading through molasses like Tolkien.
A great book should also flow such that the words never get in the way.
Tolkien knew how to tell a story.
Well, to be more accurate, Tolkien knew how to construct a plot. As far as actually "telling a story", the man pretty much stunk up the page. His prose is so dry and boring and hard to read that I've never been able to finish the books. I know I'm not alone in finding his writing unbearable.
And you sound like a despicable control freak who doesn't understand that he has no right to control the life of another person.
Of course I have the right to control the life of my kids until they become adults. That's why they're called kids, and not adults. By your theory, a seven year old should be able to decide he doesn't want to go to school anymore because he'd rather play video games all day. After all, who are you to control his life? Just as I would "control" (to use your word) my five year old, so I will "control" my 17 year old. Of course, the 17 year old has more privileges and freedom than the five year old, but it's still subject to my supervision. How much freedom is dependent on their maturity and how much trust they've earned.
Of course, you do realize that by making this post, you've pretty much guaranteed that fate will deal you the most unreasonable, jerky teenager imaginable. :) I'm sure when he wants to hang around the druggies and take heroin all day, you'll give your hearty approval for him living his own life. Or when your daughter brings home a different boyfriend to sleep in your house every night, you won't try to "control" her behavior. You certainly wouldn't want to violate their rights!
And then what, send him to boot camp? And then juvie? and finally prison? All because he wanted a little respect?
If you want respect, then you have to show respect.
ou are a horrible human being and a worse parent. Your attitude manufactures more problems than it solves.
No, my attitude solves the problems early on so I don't have to resort to extreme tactics. There are three kinds of screwed up children: parents that are too tight, parents that are too loose, and screw-ups no matter what kind a parent. You would probably accuse me of being the too tight parent, but I'm not. They get certain privileges. But if they lie to me or go behind my back, or otherwise betray trust, they need to know that the there will be major consequences to that -- just as there are in the real world.
I know, I know -- the horror of not allowing a teenager to do whatever the hell they want, whenever the hell they want! The horror of parents that actually parent their children! The horror of insisting on high standards of behavior!
The real world seems to be working out quite nicely for me right now.
Yeah, I can tell you're reeeeeeaaaaalllllyyyy well adjusted. --rolls eyes--
And just to answer your other whiny, childish "Well, I'll just [blah blah]" statements, just because you apparently had weak parents who didn't know how to fix a f***-up like yourself, doesn't mean that it's impossible. It's about identifying what you want, and taking it away until you learn to stop being a selfish jerk. It's really that simple. No friends, no privacy, no computer. And as another poster pointed out, Military School would be a definite option.
Anyway, most of your B.S. above is mere posturing. I highly doubt you're the badass rebel you're trying to make us think you are.
It's a shame your parents gave up on you. Hopefully you'll figure things out someday.
In other words if I was being monitored by my parents I'd have simply found a way to make sure they can't see what I'm doing. At worst I'd have told them to f-off and challenged them to do something about it.
You sound like you were a spoiled brat whose parents needed to give a serious attitude adjustment. I would've taken away your computer for a couple of weeks if you spoke to me like that (or if you bypassed my measures), probably along with your cellphone, your ipod and all your music. And if you still had a bad attitude, I'd take your door off the hinges. If you STILL didn't get it, I'd come to school with you and follow you around, making sure your friends saw you, until you begged for mercy.
Literally, it is QUITE the opposite:
Your links aren't working, but I'm assuming you're talking about the XBox. If Apple had a gaming platform, we could compare them, but they don't. I was specifically thinking of Windows Mobile, which is very open and easy to develop for.
Now, I KNOW what my account name is but you HAVE to admit that Apple's use of the greater software community pwns Microsoft who regularly attracts NEGATIVE hacking.
Well, the primary difference is that Microsoft doesn't enforce jack-booted control over their devices, so you don't *have* to hack them to do positive things.
I recently bought an iPhone (I really need to do a journal entry about this), and it's so good that it actually makes me hate Apple even more than I have in the past. The idiots over there cripple it so badly and in such stupid ways. It's absolutely maddening. And I never thought I'd find an application that I hate more than Quicktime, but iTunes is the WORST freaking music manager I could even imagine. God, it is a buggy, terrible piece of garbage. (Maybe they're better on the Mac than on Windows where I use it, but you'd think the interface would be the same)
I definitely need to post my iPhone review and let out some of this frustration. :)
Search engines were not only obvious, they were old hat, the battles already fought and decided, when Google appeared on the scene.
Indeed... which makes their success and utter domination all the more remarkable.
Google's "breakthrough" was being fast through distributed search, which is something that all the search engines were working on for some time.
What? I used a lot of search engines prior to Google, in fact, I still have them bookmarked: AltaVista, Excite, HotBot, MSN, Northern Light, Yahoo, etc. I used to search a variety of them because each one seemed to do better at various results. After Google appeared, I gradually stopped using them all, because Google consistently gave better results.
I don't recall Google being any faster than any of them. They all gave pretty much instantaneous results.
But the difference between "quite successful" and "super-rich" is luck, not hard work.
I might agree that the difference between "rich" and "super-rich" is mostly luck. And certainly some people get rich by attaching themselves to the right people (e.g., become one of the first 10 employees of an eventually huge IPO). But by and large, to be rich, you have to want to be rich and dedicate your thinking to that goal, and take the appropriate risks, and try again when you fail.
The google founders weren't smarter or harder-working than a hundred other people.
The issue isn't necessarily raw intelligence or level of hard work. Take 100 smart people and put them in the same situation as the Google guys. Would they fall into the same riches? I'd say "no". Technology isn't everything! You have to be able to work with people, give up control where necessary, take control when necessary, on and on. For example, Theo de Raadt is a smart, hard-working guy. Assuming he was motivated to do it, could he have created Google? Not just the search engine, the whole enchilada. Not a chance in hell, because he's an abrasive psycho.
Creating a successful company takes a lot of broad skills. There's a reason that 90% of start-ups fail.
This is ridiculous... In other words, I should have predicted that drunken bus driver go off a cliff while carrying my two children to school.
The context is business, not life.
All the very rich people I know worked about as hard as most of my successful friends.
A ditch digger works hard. It's not just about working "hard", it's about working on the right things.
They didn't have any magic technology at hand but they were unique compared to their competition in that they had enough resources to demo their early work.
Almost everything looks obvious after the fact. The wheel is "obvious", yet very few cultures actually invented it.
The fact that Google is *still* the best search engine ought to tell you something about the difficulty.
Most what is now considered their innovation was all discussed on usenet news groups long before their research was done.
Talk is cheap, and ideas are cheaper. The devil is in the details.
I know lots of others others who worked hard and had it all destroyed by bad luck.
There's no such thing as bad luck. *Everybody* encounters bad luck. There is only lack of preparation for disaster and lack for foresight for consequences.
Good God. At times like this watching both these videos, I'm reminded of a famous quote by Steve Jobs (paraphrase): The biggest problem with Microsoft is that they have no taste.
I've found that a great many of the people who criticize and dismiss RMS are often people who make extensive use of GNU tools -- I think it's worth taking a moment every now and again to consider what kind of FOSS world we'd have right now if it weren't for RMS and his mates.
I didn't realize that by using his tools, I'm obligated to agree with everything he says.
RMS has gotten sufficient accolades for writing some software, and providing a structure for open source software -- in the past. Lately, he hasn't done a hell of a lot except irritate people.
Indeed. What tipped me off was this:
The ironic part is, Word needs master documents, since it cannot reliably handle documents longer than about 40 pages.
Sheesh. I've used Word with docs hundreds of pages long dozens of times. I can only remember one document that I had trouble with, and that had a huge number of embedded files all over the place.
Who has ever gotten fired for buying AMD? Your troll makes no sense.
NOOOOOO.... must... resist... hate... Apple.... but... need... new... phone...
Gah, I bought one. $299 is like, almost reasonable, which is something new for Apple. This is actually the first money I've given Apple since 1984, when I bought an original Mac because it was neat. And the iPhone is the first Apple product since then actually was cool enough to temp me. But the $500 price tag made it out of the question.
But $299... damn it, it's probably worth $299, especially if people succeed in hacking apps onto it (particularly ssh).
*sigh* Oh well, I guess giving Apple money once every 23 years won't kill me. Hey Steve, see you in 2030!
So, saying economic collapse is the end of civilisation only serves to demonstrate your pathetically myopic notion of what it is to be "civilised" and what "civilisation" consists in and of.
Sheesh. What's extremely apparent here is that you have absolutely no idea what the word "economics" means.
Gads, you ARE an Idiot. And a Narcissist. Do yourself a big fat favour: learn how to grow your own food. And learn some analogue skills, like darning your own socks and repairing your own shirts. Some carpentry skills would be good, and a good collection of high quality hand tools for that would be wise. And learn to cook on a wood stove. Get all that together, and you'll survive OK in a small town.
You know what's really sad about this? It's that this is a big fantasy to you. You want to see the "arrogant narcissists" finally brought down, finally get what they deserve for daring to use up a limited resource. The bastards! You chortle and can't wait for the big day when we will be reduced to bronze-age farmers.
This isn't about science and mathematics to you, it's a religion. Just like some fundamentalist, you want the Earth God to smite those who dare to use resources! You *want* a harsh life, to prove your purity. No one should have luxuries, we should all live Puritan lifestyles. Look at the hellfire you've been spewing in this thread, all the insults and hatred.
"I say unto you, some day the SUV drivers shall be cast into the lake of fire, to burn in eternal damnation!"
Sorry, but it just ain't gonna happen. Like I said in another post, it's a mathematical certainty that we will not have an economic collapse of any kind. The switchover cost will be amortized over decades. It will be a gradual process of parts of the world economies switching over. It simply won't happen fast enough to have significant effects, much less the ridiculous notion of everyone reduced to growing our own food and repairing my own shirts.
Thanks for confirming that you aren't even bothering to read my posts. Some other dude said that, asshat. Pay attention.
Oops, sorry about that. When I have two people screaming and insulting me with basically the same ill-considered arguments while answering each other's posts, it gets confusing.
We will not magically just switch over to the alternatives. The in-between time is going to be full of, you guessed it, problems.
Sure there's going to be problems. And...? When aren't there problems with everything in the world? But mostly it'll be a pretty smooth transition.
Pay attention: I'm not a doom-and-gloomer.
LOL. This from the man who just said, and I quote, "We are completely and utterly fucked - I think the next 50 years is going to see an economic collapse of epic proportions..."
Nice way to contradict yourself. If that's not gloom and doom to you, I'd hate to see what you consider a gloomy outlook!
Oh, and did you just compare y2k to the peak oil problem? Hilarious. You need a little more of what you purport to sell...
Yeah, I did. It was EXACTLY the same. I had EXACTLY the same debate with all the same predictions of economic collapse. I don't know, maybe you weren't around then, but it only seems like a trivial comparison because Y2K is *perceived* to be such a letdown joke. But it wasn't... hundreds of billions of dollars were spent to fix it, most of it at the last minute.
The Peak Oil problem is only a problem if you think the world can't adapt. It's actually not as big a problem as Y2K, in a sense... Y2K had an absolute deadline. Once we being the oil decline, we'll have decades to fix it. Ironically, as more and more people switch to different energy sources, we'll actually see a decline in oil prices, because of the lack of demand. Then it will start to rise again because of supply, then it will fall because of demand, then...
But let me guess... you think supply and demand is a bunch of nonsense.
It is a mathematical certainty that Peak Oil will not cause a massive economic crisis. The switchover will be amortized over decades.
And your central point, at best, is vaporware. Hope is not a strategy. What are ya, George Bush?
Nope. No hope required, only facts and logic. It is simply factual that alternatives to oil exist, such as oil shale and Thermal Depolymerization. Not to mention coal, which is not ideal, but it does exist. As well as nuclear power. Hell, if the crisis gets bad enough, maybe we'll actually start doing breeder reactors. And it is simply logical that if oil gets sufficiently more expensive than the alternatives, then we'll simply switch to the alternatives. Economics 101, my friend.
You might remember the last TEOTWAWKI crisis, the Y2K problem. It *was* a gigantic problem that, if it went unfixed, would've caused untold economic crisis. But once again, the world is not static. Things change if they *have* to change. And massive changes to our infrastructure were made pretty much invisibly to the outer world.
We will change over to the alternate technologies because we *have* to change. Why don't we change now? Why should we? (Relatively) cheap oil still exists. Not as cheap as it once was, but not crisis level expensive.
Gloom and doomers like you really, really need to take some economics classes. It's not just about money; economics reveals many truths. The world is not static. The world changes and adapts. If there were no other workable alternatives, then you could accuse me of 'hope and pray' beliefs. But there are numerous alternatives, all waiting their economic turn.
I never said anything about "Civilisation breaking down". Economic Collapse? Yes. I said that. End of Civilisation? No. I did not say that.
In my world, "economic collapse" means "civilization breaking down".
Anyway, the fact that you have to scream at me with frothing anger, with little actual rebuttal of my central point*, should tell you that you're not thinking clearly about the issue.
(*the central point, since you missed it, is that other tech will naturally take over in a gradual way.)
Maybe they'll find out that children's farts magically cleave ordinary mud and rock into equal parts sweet crude and distilled water, but until then, all we'll be doing is running up an ever-accelerating escalator.
No magic is required for this. Really. All of the gloom and doom scenerios assume a static world -- if oil vanished tomorrow, we'd be screwed. Or if technological advancement suddenly stopped, we'd be screwed. Well, duh. But it's not a static world, and never has been.
Mark my words: when cheap oil starts to permanently climb in price (whenever it happens), some new technology will "suddenly" appear, and the gloom-and-doomers will say, "But, but, but, we *would've* been screwed if inexpensive [xxx] hadn't appeared!! We were right at the time!! How could we have predicted inexpensive [xxx]???"
How can you predict it, indeed.