I have never understood how anyone alive in Christ and the church could *not* be a Sola Scriptura-ist. At least to me, after years of liturgical dulldrums, my relationship with God only came alive when reading or hearing and then obeying His Word. I thoroughly enjoy insights from theologians, but it all comes down to a 1/1 relationship.
I mean, didn't God spend most of the Old Testament, culminating in the vanishing of 10/12ths of the Israelis, in getting the Jews to *stop* integrating the beliefs of other cultures and to, yes, become Sola Scripura-ists?!?!
Now on the Arc...I just re-read Genesis 6:9, and with the greatest effort I can't see this one as a non-literal account. A fantastic story, yes, but not a symbolic one. Lots of nice, literal shipbuilding details which I guess actually make engineering sense.
Noah's Ark is clearly a literary form (flood story) that is documented to have existed all over the ancient world. The official methodology that Catholics would use to understand this story involves looking at the ways in which the Jewish version is different from say, the Sumerian version, thereby gaining some insight into what the Old Testament authors thought was important about it.
Taking it another way, your assertion that one must combine other culture's flood accounts implies one or more of the following.
The Jews didn't know about the other accounts
The Jews knew about the stories but never made the connection that it might be the same flood
The Jews borrowed/made up the story, just like they must have made up all the other stories including those that portray them as an incredibly disobedient people, and yet somehow on their own with no help from God survived to this day as messengers of this fiction, suffering horribly along the way.
The Jews knew about the other accounts, but since they got their information first hand from the one true God, they realized the other accounts were tainted echoes and therefore hogwash. This is why, while they had a whole bunch of problems with God's word, you do not see lots of arguments about Noah's ark, nor do we see prophets or Jesus' disciples who had the opportunity to talk to God himself, ask for 'the real deal' on Noah.
Your relationship with God will always improve when you give His word the benefit of your doubt.
On the good side, I *do* know that the telemarketers are taking their 'do not call or else' thing seriously, so maybe if this worked in a similar way it would cut down on spyware as well.
But this is too 'smooshy'. How do you define Spyware? Does Gator/Kazaa escape because they tell you they're installing spyware in their EULA fine print? Would it create major hassles for legit software utilities that run in the background because of predictably poor legislation?
It's almost like you need a council of nerds to deem software good and evil - kind of like we have anti-virus teams already that categorize and report on them. But, like everything else, the law will have to boil down to something lawyers and judges can understand and control.
Since the prequels disappointed everyone, and since at this point people can roll-their-own movie on their PCs, why don't we start a 'GNU-SW' and re-do the prequels ourselves? Some changes I'd like to see...
1) More space battles. To me, this, not the creatures, is what makes Star Wars, well Star Wars. In Episode 1, there is more or less one and it was terrible. Yes, I know space battles today are 'easy' and the CG guys want to show off, but I want to be entertained, not impressed.
2) Spacecraft Continuity. Yeah, I know you're trying to show off how computers can make ships with complex geometry. But I like the good old Ralph McQuarrie ships. To me the grimy 'raw' look of the Rebels and the austere design of the Imperials was magic.
3) Less creatures. I mean, having aliens as background is cool, and introducing one or two key ones (e.g. Yoda & Jabba) worked, but to introduce a dozen or so and try to give them personalities just is too much to digest in one movie. Come to think of it, Jabba and Yoda worked better than any CGI creature I've seen to date...
4) Ralph McQuarrie. As much as anything, his artistic genius made Star Wars, well, Star Wars.
5) Story. You know, actually I don't have that big of a problem with the Episode I & II stories if you can strip away the execution. Seemed to me that there was a good foundation that was ruined by execution and stupid details.
Of course, whether a rag-tag Rebel-like team of internet hackers can do better remains to be seen...
Just like sugar, cigarettes and crack. While you're on it, you think all-in-all everything's ok. Sure, you know it'd be better to stop, but heck you deserve to enjoy yourself and you work too hard to take on another 'project'.
But stop and think about it objectively for a minute. What do you *really* get out of seeing each and every A-Team/Friends/Night Rider/Buffy episode? Doesn't it seem pathetic when you realize most of your cable viewing consists of hours of watching something mildly interesting for 3 minutes, flipping, repeat?
And let me promise you, if you do stop, the world seems like a different place. You'll actually enjoy TV more when you watch it, say, at a hotel. You'll realize how TV more or less recycles the same storylines and junk because after years of not watching, you really won't have missed much.
The strangest thing is that you'll realize how much you are talked down to by commercials and the news. Wonder why people in classic movies talk with sophistication while adults today sound like junior high dropouts of the past? It's because we rise or lower ourselves to our environment, and TV has become in a twisted way our primary interface to reality.
Don't even get me started if you have kids...unless you want them to turn out to be just like all the other illiterate, overweight, short attention span, "can't compete with Indian kids after $80k of eduction but knows every Simpson's/Sponge Bob episode by heart" losers.
So...do what I do. No broadcast TV. No cable. Take it out of your house. Like a drug, the only way to really kick it is to quit completely and keep it out of sight. Don't even connect the antenna. There are plenty of Movies and DVDs to keep you occupied.
Open source projects consistently do a great job at replicating stuff that non-open source groups develop. GNU/Linux itself is more or less a remake of Unix. MySQL reimplemented SQL. Samba emulates Microsoft's protocol, etc. That's because coming up with and delivering completely new things is hard. It usually requires pain, and some really unpopular decisions which fly in the face of the Open Source culture.
Of course, this effect is amplified with UI/highly integrated applications. When text is the input and the output, it's easy to glue things together with grep/awk and automate with scripts. But the user interface with text is simple, clean and unchanged after several decades. A GUI app inherently begs for some kind of library because few can (or should!) code this stuff from scratch. Fine. Except how often are you happy with the baked-in stuff for all but the simplest apps?
So once you venture from text, you suddenly face the obstacles Microsoft has tried to fix with COM/DCOM/DDE/OLE/.NET/ATL/MFC and so on.
The disadvantage Open Source had vs. Corporate-ware (and I mean *had*) is that chaos erupts with no unifying thing to keep all the GUI and inter-app stuff in line. It seems that the distros are now becoming that unifying force. The downside is that it is getting hard to tell the difference between RedHat and Microsoft!
I should then also mention that I wrote my post this morning inspired by the next equinoxen while being pulled by muskoxen avoiding toxins and checking my stoxen (stocks-en?) while eating bagles and loxen while speaking with religious orthodoxen about paradoxen.
From what I understand, It's a Linux system, running a modified Gnome with some extra nicely well done integration with Java's runtime. I think more accurately it should be called the 'C' desktop.
I wonder if it's bundled with 'digital ready' speakers.
Even for personal use, I used to be a die-hard source-level builder.
But then one day I had to upgrade Apache. My target system is so old that none of the RPM's work, so I *had* to do it by hand else upset the whole thing with a new distro install.
Well, building Apache is no big deal. But Apache out of the chute with its stock source build is *not* the Apache you know and love. I had to also build ModPerl, OpenSSL and all the other packages it needs *in the right order* because of some problem with the build script. Suffice it to say, I blew the better part of a day on it.
So really, in some cases you must resist the die-hard urge to do it yourself. Hard drive space is basically free. Rarely will you really notice the performance. Your time is expensive and better spent.
And most of all, you don't have to face the dreadful feeling that happens when you realize you have to do a painful install all over again and can't remember all the weird tricky hacks you had to do.
So the RIAA has no names, just IP addresses. Given very few people have their own permanent IP, are we assuming that the RIAA would puzzle out logs from DHCP servers?
Though I really only speak English well, it would sadden me if no one spoke anything but English. Believe it or not, in the same way some computer languages express logical constructs better than others, each verbal language offers subtleties that allows some concepts and thoughts to be transmitted easier than others.
As someone that likes to study the Bible, I've seen this first hand. Sure, you can get the idea across but it often takes lots of footnotes or multiple versions to explain how many things get 'lost in translation'.
I suppose some of this can be fixed by borrowing nouns and verbs as the Japanese do. For instance, how would one say 'touche' in English? "Ah ha! You have defeated me. And yet I respect you as an opponent!". But what cannot be easily fixed is the expressiveness of grammar...
The transition from 16 to 32 bit was a much BIGGER deal than from 32 to 64. Did you ever write 16 bit code? It was highly unnatural with all the segment/offset insanity. It was a very abrupt transition to the much simpler 32 bit virtual memory address space. And though it became easy for the programmer to just grab big monstrous memory chunks, it forced Microsoft to write a true, modern OS and they did not do that overnight. Plus, the mounds of 16 bit programs wouldn't play nice with their 32 bit counterparts. This took a long time to sort out.
But now, while there are issues in going from 32 to 64 bits, we're not talking about re-architecting software. We're mostly talking about recompilation and some Y2K-like sensitivity to sloppy code that ignored the possibility that there would someday be 64 bits. I mean, you can run 64 bit Linux *today* all day long on Itanium!
...consisted of extensive hand-written notes that Professor Miller, a die hard classic professor at Clarkson University, wrote for use in my Calculus classes. It covered what you needed to know, and matched his lectures. Black and white, no companion CD, no word processor - everything was done by hand. Priceless. If only more teachers did the same.
I had a summer internship in New Jersey at a brand new factory making water cooler and milk jug bottles. You worked a 12 hour shift with only 40 minutes of break. The bottles would come out and burn your hands through the flimsy provided gloves. The grinder that recycled the bad bottles was as loud as a banshee.
But here's the worst part: The machine worked by drooping a molten 'sock' of plastic from the top of the machine. When it reached the right length, a mold would clamp over it and inflate from within into a bottle. Because this was a new factory, they were always tweaking the rate at which the sock drooped. If it came down too fast, it'd waste plastic. If it came down too slow, the bottle wouldn't be incomplete. BUT if just slightly less than the right amount came out, it would EXPLODE like a BOMB and because obviously you couldn't see inside the mold you would have no idea this explosive shock was coming.
I dunno - this sounds like this came from the same team that thought Virtua Boy would sell. Why would you spend such a large portion of you design and cost budget on a second screen? So we can play a 100% accurate version of the arcade 'Punch Out' game?
Today, since every game seems destined for porting to multiple platforms, this feature will make this system an ugly duckling. Either you won't use the screen because none of the other platforms have it, or your games that use the second screen won't port over well.
Reading this, it reminds me of the 'Mother Confessor' characters in the 'Sword of Truth' series by Terry Goodkind. The idea is that anyone with the ability to tell truth with certainty beomes...
Hated by most everyone
Incredibly powerful
I can't imagine how the world will change if most people wear this thing - as I expect them to. I don't know if it would be for the better. I mean, on one hand it curbs lieing, but on the other hand it might simply make our increasingly anti-social society that much more so! Heck, we may all end up speaking with Hawking-like devices.
I mean, maybe your neighbor's wife turns you on. You can't help that. And, so long as you don't do anything there's nothing wrong. But if you knew he had a 'lust detector' on his answering machine, would you ever call him?
You're right, statistically speaking if you used this device as an automated 'Are you a terrorist' booth to walk through with a big RED light for terrorist and GREEN light for normal person you'd have so many false positives as to make it useless because (10% * # of ok people) >> (90% * # of evil people).
But as the article describes, this device works best as a first cut "Where's the BS in this story" detector. It is, in a sense, a sensory enhancer to complement that techniques and skills that people that are experts at this sort of thing already possess.
In fact, to add something to my own point, I (though I manage my own web server/DHCP/firewall/fileserver at home) only use Yahoo mail. Yeah, the web interface is a bit clunkier, but my data is safe, they handle the spam filter, and I can get to it anywhere with no software issues. Sure, I could set up something even better with SpamAssassin and some work, but never underestimate the laziness quotient.
This to me is a great forerunner to utility computing, and is workable because the bandwidth matches the application. When everyone has DSL or greater speed, many more applications will open up.
If PCs continue to live in a world of their own among consumer products, utility computing will become 'the answer' to its own problems.
I mean, today, I buy any other piece of consumer electronics, I plug it in, and I use it. It breaks, I throw it out.
With a PC, I have this thing that needs to be maintained, occasionally turned on and off, needs to be asked permission to be turned off, becomes useless when its OS gets EOL'd, has software from dozens of companies on it, and still has stone-age level means of really assessing/changing how it's configured. It's a big load on a consumer's patience and requires much more skill to really safely wield than all but a few geeks possess. (asside: I think this is one reason MS will be surprised at how fast Linux catches on, because the extra ease of use of MS is eclipsed by the 'you can fix anything, there are no dead ends' attribute of Linux) Plus, more and more our PCs hold valuable content (your baby photos, your music library).
So...eventually if someone instead offers a cheap, indestructable maintenance-free terminal and left the ugly issues of data storage, backup, application upgrades, virus definitions, and more to be handled for you remotely somewhere, and if it was done cleanly over a super fast connection, I think this idea will take off because consumers will value convenience over the flexibility and pain of essentially being a 1-man IT department for your own house.
I agree with your assessment of SJ, but disagree on SF or SC. Rich people like golf courses, easy parking and exclusivity. SF is crowded, in-your-face radical, inconvenient and unfriendly to old people. There are beaches but they're crowded and more the kind you look at than spend time on. SC is all these things too and is largely infected with irritating college students. Neither town is friendly to any kind of construction, either. Most of the wealth is going to Florida, especially given CA's oppressive taxes.
Don't get me wrong, I love SC, SF and even SJ a bit. But if I was filthy rich, I'd be on Coronado Island!
Sure, a few smart guys in a garage will always outmanuevre a mound of VCs and suits. Thing is, the VCs don't care about small potatoes, even very well run and profitable small potatoes. They want big potatoes. They have A LOT of money to manage and they need a MAJOR payoff to make it worth their while. This kind of company doesn't 'scale' in their minds.
And this is really why the.com thing came and went. The VCs (and Wall Street), who have the money, created an evironment which led to lots of 'fluff' in the form of huge headcounts, 'internet presences' and above all, growth (profits be damned!). Heck, they essentially automated the creation of companies very much like the music industry automates the creation of music (ok, write a business plan, get a valuation, hire, make a website, etc.).
I have to play devil's advocate here. I've been part of lots of startups where I too thought that I had all the answers. And maybe I/you did. But this attitude can drive you nuts. So for your own sanity consider this...
1) Ok, what they did didn't work. That doesn't mean your 'do anything to get started' plan would have necessarily worked either.
2) The squeaky wheel does get fixed, that is, unless it just keeps squeaking. Then it gets thrown away for a nice, quiet one from India. Seriously, lingering bitterness just means you're cutting off future opportunities
3) Yes, there was wasted opportunity. It's gone. Forget it. Look for the *next* opportunity! Or do it yourself next time and show them!
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, didn't God spend most of the Old Testament, culminating in the vanishing of 10/12ths of the Israelis, in getting the Jews to *stop* integrating the beliefs of other cultures and to, yes, become Sola Scripura-ists?!?!
Now on the Arc...I just re-read Genesis 6:9, and with the greatest effort I can't see this one as a non-literal account. A fantastic story, yes, but not a symbolic one. Lots of nice, literal shipbuilding details which I guess actually make engineering sense.
Noah's Ark is clearly a literary form (flood story) that is documented to have existed all over the ancient world. The official methodology that Catholics would use to understand this story involves looking at the ways in which the Jewish version is different from say, the Sumerian version, thereby gaining some insight into what the Old Testament authors thought was important about it.
Taking it another way, your assertion that one must combine other culture's flood accounts implies one or more of the following.
Your relationship with God will always improve when you give His word the benefit of your doubt.
On the good side, I *do* know that the telemarketers are taking their 'do not call or else' thing seriously, so maybe if this worked in a similar way it would cut down on spyware as well.
But this is too 'smooshy'. How do you define Spyware? Does Gator/Kazaa escape because they tell you they're installing spyware in their EULA fine print? Would it create major hassles for legit software utilities that run in the background because of predictably poor legislation?
It's almost like you need a council of nerds to deem software good and evil - kind of like we have anti-virus teams already that categorize and report on them. But, like everything else, the law will have to boil down to something lawyers and judges can understand and control.
Since the prequels disappointed everyone, and since at this point people can roll-their-own movie on their PCs, why don't we start a 'GNU-SW' and re-do the prequels ourselves? Some changes I'd like to see...
1) More space battles. To me, this, not the creatures, is what makes Star Wars, well Star Wars. In Episode 1, there is more or less one and it was terrible. Yes, I know space battles today are 'easy' and the CG guys want to show off, but I want to be entertained, not impressed.
2) Spacecraft Continuity. Yeah, I know you're trying to show off how computers can make ships with complex geometry. But I like the good old Ralph McQuarrie ships. To me the grimy 'raw' look of the Rebels and the austere design of the Imperials was magic.
3) Less creatures. I mean, having aliens as background is cool, and introducing one or two key ones (e.g. Yoda & Jabba) worked, but to introduce a dozen or so and try to give them personalities just is too much to digest in one movie. Come to think of it, Jabba and Yoda worked better than any CGI creature I've seen to date...
4) Ralph McQuarrie. As much as anything, his artistic genius made Star Wars, well, Star Wars.
5) Story. You know, actually I don't have that big of a problem with the Episode I & II stories if you can strip away the execution. Seemed to me that there was a good foundation that was ruined by execution and stupid details.
Of course, whether a rag-tag Rebel-like team of internet hackers can do better remains to be seen...
Just like sugar, cigarettes and crack. While you're on it, you think all-in-all everything's ok. Sure, you know it'd be better to stop, but heck you deserve to enjoy yourself and you work too hard to take on another 'project'.
But stop and think about it objectively for a minute. What do you *really* get out of seeing each and every A-Team/Friends/Night Rider/Buffy episode? Doesn't it seem pathetic when you realize most of your cable viewing consists of hours of watching something mildly interesting for 3 minutes, flipping, repeat?
And let me promise you, if you do stop, the world seems like a different place. You'll actually enjoy TV more when you watch it, say, at a hotel. You'll realize how TV more or less recycles the same storylines and junk because after years of not watching, you really won't have missed much.
The strangest thing is that you'll realize how much you are talked down to by commercials and the news. Wonder why people in classic movies talk with sophistication while adults today sound like junior high dropouts of the past? It's because we rise or lower ourselves to our environment, and TV has become in a twisted way our primary interface to reality.
Don't even get me started if you have kids...unless you want them to turn out to be just like all the other illiterate, overweight, short attention span, "can't compete with Indian kids after $80k of eduction but knows every Simpson's/Sponge Bob episode by heart" losers.
So...do what I do. No broadcast TV. No cable. Take it out of your house. Like a drug, the only way to really kick it is to quit completely and keep it out of sight. Don't even connect the antenna. There are plenty of Movies and DVDs to keep you occupied.
Open source projects consistently do a great job at replicating stuff that non-open source groups develop. GNU/Linux itself is more or less a remake of Unix. MySQL reimplemented SQL. Samba emulates Microsoft's protocol, etc. That's because coming up with and delivering completely new things is hard. It usually requires pain, and some really unpopular decisions which fly in the face of the Open Source culture.
Of course, this effect is amplified with UI/highly integrated applications. When text is the input and the output, it's easy to glue things together with grep/awk and automate with scripts. But the user interface with text is simple, clean and unchanged after several decades. A GUI app inherently begs for some kind of library because few can (or should!) code this stuff from scratch. Fine. Except how often are you happy with the baked-in stuff for all but the simplest apps?
So once you venture from text, you suddenly face the obstacles Microsoft has tried to fix with COM/DCOM/DDE/OLE/.NET/ATL/MFC and so on.
The disadvantage Open Source had vs. Corporate-ware (and I mean *had*) is that chaos erupts with no unifying thing to keep all the GUI and inter-app stuff in line. It seems that the distros are now becoming that unifying force. The downside is that it is getting hard to tell the difference between RedHat and Microsoft!
I"M ONN KUP 28 WiILL uPTADE YOU WhEN I GET TO 100 ORD IE fRIST. DOO LATTes COUNT I HOPE sO.
I should then also mention that I wrote my post this morning inspired by the next equinoxen while being pulled by muskoxen avoiding toxins and checking my stoxen (stocks-en?) while eating bagles and loxen while speaking with religious orthodoxen about paradoxen.
Hmmm...everyone's dying to put Linux on their X-Boxen, and Windows on their Linux boxen. I guess no one is every happy with their native OS.
From what I understand, It's a Linux system, running a modified Gnome with some extra nicely well done integration with Java's runtime. I think more accurately it should be called the 'C' desktop.
I wonder if it's bundled with 'digital ready' speakers.
Even for personal use, I used to be a die-hard source-level builder.
But then one day I had to upgrade Apache. My target system is so old that none of the RPM's work, so I *had* to do it by hand else upset the whole thing with a new distro install.
Well, building Apache is no big deal. But Apache out of the chute with its stock source build is *not* the Apache you know and love. I had to also build ModPerl, OpenSSL and all the other packages it needs *in the right order* because of some problem with the build script. Suffice it to say, I blew the better part of a day on it.
So really, in some cases you must resist the die-hard urge to do it yourself. Hard drive space is basically free. Rarely will you really notice the performance. Your time is expensive and better spent.
And most of all, you don't have to face the dreadful feeling that happens when you realize you have to do a painful install all over again and can't remember all the weird tricky hacks you had to do.
So the RIAA has no names, just IP addresses. Given very few people have their own permanent IP, are we assuming that the RIAA would puzzle out logs from DHCP servers?
Not bad for an ATARI 8-bit system at 2.5mhz and 8 floppy drives.
Wow, 2.5 Mhz? All the Atari 8 bit machines I had were 1.79 Mhz 6502's!
Though I really only speak English well, it would sadden me if no one spoke anything but English. Believe it or not, in the same way some computer languages express logical constructs better than others, each verbal language offers subtleties that allows some concepts and thoughts to be transmitted easier than others.
As someone that likes to study the Bible, I've seen this first hand. Sure, you can get the idea across but it often takes lots of footnotes or multiple versions to explain how many things get 'lost in translation'.
I suppose some of this can be fixed by borrowing nouns and verbs as the Japanese do. For instance, how would one say 'touche' in English? "Ah ha! You have defeated me. And yet I respect you as an opponent!". But what cannot be easily fixed is the expressiveness of grammar...
The transition from 16 to 32 bit was a much BIGGER deal than from 32 to 64. Did you ever write 16 bit code? It was highly unnatural with all the segment/offset insanity. It was a very abrupt transition to the much simpler 32 bit virtual memory address space. And though it became easy for the programmer to just grab big monstrous memory chunks, it forced Microsoft to write a true, modern OS and they did not do that overnight. Plus, the mounds of 16 bit programs wouldn't play nice with their 32 bit counterparts. This took a long time to sort out.
But now, while there are issues in going from 32 to 64 bits, we're not talking about re-architecting software. We're mostly talking about recompilation and some Y2K-like sensitivity to sloppy code that ignored the possibility that there would someday be 64 bits. I mean, you can run 64 bit Linux *today* all day long on Itanium!
...consisted of extensive hand-written notes that Professor Miller, a die hard classic professor at Clarkson University, wrote for use in my Calculus classes. It covered what you needed to know, and matched his lectures. Black and white, no companion CD, no word processor - everything was done by hand. Priceless. If only more teachers did the same.
I had a summer internship in New Jersey at a brand new factory making water cooler and milk jug bottles. You worked a 12 hour shift with only 40 minutes of break. The bottles would come out and burn your hands through the flimsy provided gloves. The grinder that recycled the bad bottles was as loud as a banshee.
But here's the worst part: The machine worked by drooping a molten 'sock' of plastic from the top of the machine. When it reached the right length, a mold would clamp over it and inflate from within into a bottle. Because this was a new factory, they were always tweaking the rate at which the sock drooped. If it came down too fast, it'd waste plastic. If it came down too slow, the bottle wouldn't be incomplete. BUT if just slightly less than the right amount came out, it would EXPLODE like a BOMB and because obviously you couldn't see inside the mold you would have no idea this explosive shock was coming.
Shiver.
I dunno - this sounds like this came from the same team that thought Virtua Boy would sell. Why would you spend such a large portion of you design and cost budget on a second screen? So we can play a 100% accurate version of the arcade 'Punch Out' game?
Today, since every game seems destined for porting to multiple platforms, this feature will make this system an ugly duckling. Either you won't use the screen because none of the other platforms have it, or your games that use the second screen won't port over well.
I can't imagine how the world will change if most people wear this thing - as I expect them to. I don't know if it would be for the better. I mean, on one hand it curbs lieing, but on the other hand it might simply make our increasingly anti-social society that much more so! Heck, we may all end up speaking with Hawking-like devices.
I mean, maybe your neighbor's wife turns you on. You can't help that. And, so long as you don't do anything there's nothing wrong. But if you knew he had a 'lust detector' on his answering machine, would you ever call him?
You're right, statistically speaking if you used this device as an automated 'Are you a terrorist' booth to walk through with a big RED light for terrorist and GREEN light for normal person you'd have so many false positives as to make it useless because (10% * # of ok people) >> (90% * # of evil people).
But as the article describes, this device works best as a first cut "Where's the BS in this story" detector. It is, in a sense, a sensory enhancer to complement that techniques and skills that people that are experts at this sort of thing already possess.
Like a syntax highlighter.
In fact, to add something to my own point, I (though I manage my own web server/DHCP/firewall/fileserver at home) only use Yahoo mail. Yeah, the web interface is a bit clunkier, but my data is safe, they handle the spam filter, and I can get to it anywhere with no software issues. Sure, I could set up something even better with SpamAssassin and some work, but never underestimate the laziness quotient.
This to me is a great forerunner to utility computing, and is workable because the bandwidth matches the application. When everyone has DSL or greater speed, many more applications will open up.
If PCs continue to live in a world of their own among consumer products, utility computing will become 'the answer' to its own problems.
I mean, today, I buy any other piece of consumer electronics, I plug it in, and I use it. It breaks, I throw it out.
With a PC, I have this thing that needs to be maintained, occasionally turned on and off, needs to be asked permission to be turned off, becomes useless when its OS gets EOL'd, has software from dozens of companies on it, and still has stone-age level means of really assessing/changing how it's configured. It's a big load on a consumer's patience and requires much more skill to really safely wield than all but a few geeks possess. (asside: I think this is one reason MS will be surprised at how fast Linux catches on, because the extra ease of use of MS is eclipsed by the 'you can fix anything, there are no dead ends' attribute of Linux) Plus, more and more our PCs hold valuable content (your baby photos, your music library).
So...eventually if someone instead offers a cheap, indestructable maintenance-free terminal and left the ugly issues of data storage, backup, application upgrades, virus definitions, and more to be handled for you remotely somewhere, and if it was done cleanly over a super fast connection, I think this idea will take off because consumers will value convenience over the flexibility and pain of essentially being a 1-man IT department for your own house.
You really have nothing to worry about, Mr. Anderson.
I agree with your assessment of SJ, but disagree on SF or SC. Rich people like golf courses, easy parking and exclusivity. SF is crowded, in-your-face radical, inconvenient and unfriendly to old people. There are beaches but they're crowded and more the kind you look at than spend time on. SC is all these things too and is largely infected with irritating college students. Neither town is friendly to any kind of construction, either. Most of the wealth is going to Florida, especially given CA's oppressive taxes.
Don't get me wrong, I love SC, SF and even SJ a bit. But if I was filthy rich, I'd be on Coronado Island!
Sure, a few smart guys in a garage will always outmanuevre a mound of VCs and suits. Thing is, the VCs don't care about small potatoes, even very well run and profitable small potatoes. They want big potatoes. They have A LOT of money to manage and they need a MAJOR payoff to make it worth their while. This kind of company doesn't 'scale' in their minds.
.com thing came and went. The VCs (and Wall Street), who have the money, created an evironment which led to lots of 'fluff' in the form of huge headcounts, 'internet presences' and above all, growth (profits be damned!). Heck, they essentially automated the creation of companies very much like the music industry automates the creation of music (ok, write a business plan, get a valuation, hire, make a website, etc.).
And this is really why the
I have to play devil's advocate here. I've been part of lots of startups where I too thought that I had all the answers. And maybe I/you did. But this attitude can drive you nuts. So for your own sanity consider this...
1) Ok, what they did didn't work. That doesn't mean your 'do anything to get started' plan would have necessarily worked either.
2) The squeaky wheel does get fixed, that is, unless it just keeps squeaking. Then it gets thrown away for a nice, quiet one from India. Seriously, lingering bitterness just means you're cutting off future opportunities
3) Yes, there was wasted opportunity. It's gone. Forget it. Look for the *next* opportunity! Or do it yourself next time and show them!