I always wanted the 15C. A guy in my Physics class had one. When I offered to buy it from him, he said initially yes, but then he became attached to it because I told him it was a piece of art.
IIRC, its numerics algorithms were designed, at least in part, by renowned numerical analyst/expert Prof. William Kahan.
Your comparison is stupidly arrogant (if such a thing exists...) Let me draw it for you: a chainsaw to a common saw. They are built for different things. You don't need Mathematica when you just want to simulate scenarios for a down payment in front of the salesman in the dealership.
That would be moronic. It would show instantly that you don't grok the 12C. That you live up in the clouds. That you can't cook. That you don't get pussy. That you don't have real money. It means you're an instant goner.
Also, you can't shove Mathematica in your pocket. It's portable, it's bug-free, and it delivers.
This calculator is like a screwdriver: a perfect fit for the task.
The Platinum shipped with a bug. The 12C...well, there are no bugs.
RPN is great. Once you get used to it, you never look back. BTW, RPN is what the Forth programming language uses.
When doing financial calculations or shopping I always take it with me. Also to the bank. It creates an instant bonding between you and the manager (those initiated in HP 12C's RPN).
HP calculators, IIRC, were used to calculate the orbits in some early space program missions (YouTube). I think it's safe to say that the 12C is more numerically trustworthy than some Pentiums that came out....
A trained scientist/engineer can usually make the move into business/management later in life.
This is if you're an engineer, a field in which you can play all bases involving manufacturing a product or delivering a service. Think now of a geophysicist, or a marine biologist. There might be money to be made in those fields as an entrepreneur, but they will demand going down the unbeaten path. That being the case, it's a much harder sell going to your bank manager for credit.
Besides, as as you say, the sort of mathematics involved in putting the average business model on a spreadsheet is - let's be frank - a child's play compared to real rawhide math, such as the kind a physicist needs. Also, the kind of investment and supply chain is very well developed in the engineering field. But imagine what that would be like if your field was deep water marine biology...!
There's a book called "My Life as a Quant" which is an autobiography by a physicist that ends up working for Wall Street (doing "quantitative modelling", hence the term). He tell of the hardships of the academic career, the never ending supply of nigh-insuperable walls he always had to climb, only to lay flat on his face, even without decent work/pay opportunities.
Turns out he made ton of money on Wall Street. It's no wonder so many turn to finance.Pretty interesting read.
Scientists are badly paid everywhere. My dad's a scientist and he tells me colleagues of his, in Germany, where pretty pissed off because they didn't make much more money than the skilled technician, but the responsibilities of a scientist...well, no comparison.
BTW, believe it or not, my mother (also a scientist) did her master's with a Nobel laureate in her field. She's a doctor and she always made a lot less money than, say, her neurologist best friend, who didn't have a research career. I've never seen anybody work as hard as she did...I mean really...Countless weekends at the lab. Many, many week days of coming home very, very late. For years, she would put out very long hours (in fact, my dad worked alongside her with the same intensity too). This compiled with a high dose of stress due to the pressure to publish or perish, while getting nagged by the bureaucrats that distributed the grants.
Today, she absolutely hates the academic institution. She had breast cancer and retired (she's doing very well) and it's like she went on vacation.
The fact of the matter is that scientists are treated as a bunch of stupid morons by the political establishment, because they will work for little money just out of love for science. But this will inevitably backfire. For instance, you don't see many doctors going into a research-only career. IMHO, that bad. Physics departments have ever dwindling numbers (should we say asymptotic?) of graduates...
Research supported by public money is research that filters back to society, unhindered by the slew of stupid patents for every insignificant little thing such as we see in the private sector. It is the type of research that private enterprises cannot and will not pursue...investigating phenomenons that as of now have no practical application, but that in the future may become a part of our daily lives. There are many examples, such as lasers, retroviridae, number theory, etc. Society needs basic research.
Well, forgive me for not being a little worm inside your head, watching your every thought. I'm sorry that I pointed out the logical flaws in what you stated, and now you are angry.
And, yes, attack me and say I'm "pro-Microsoft". Actually, I do like Microsoft, and I do like Apple. Being a Linux user since, I dunno, 98, I find it still very, very aggravating and horribly buggy. In fact, Mac OS X and WIndows have gotten to a point that they beat Linux. Linux is behind the curve in tech.
I'm pro-Good Code (and BTW, there are areas like "formal" driver verification in which Microsoft is light years ahead of Linux.). And actually, what I really like is the free market, where one gets to pick and choose excellent software, as opposed to being restricted to a small number of really shitty apps that don't do half of what people expect. Just look around you: everywhere, in every industry - do you see Linux (except running servers)? Exactly, no Linux. Linux doesn't exist except as infrastructure software. That is what it will always be, because you CANT RUN A BUSINESS BASED ON LINUX, UNLESS IT'S SOME KIND OF WEB SERVICE THING. Or you dual-license, which is lame excuse for "proprietary".
...You mean, like, IBM ?! You mean Red Hat (stocks up this week, all thanks to their proprietary per-seat licennsing, just like *all* the other players...)
Geez, seriously delusional...Get some info in your brain.
The GPL protects the *freedom of the code*, not the freedom of developers. (...) I really can not fathom that this logic still eludes people.
"Freedom" is a concept that only applies to humans!
For instance, can your electrical appliances be considered your slaves, that is, "not free"? I hope you see how ridiculous that line of reasoning is...
'I really can not fathom that this logic still eludes people'.;-)
BSD isn't bad per se, but it allows a 'bad player' like Microsoft to modify standards in ways that break interoperability.
This factually wrong. First of all, if there is in fact a standard than Microsoft doesn't modify it at will, because most likely it will be issue buy a body of experts (W3C, ISO, POSIX, etc.) If it's a standard owned by Microsoft well, then, you're damn right they can change it.
Besides, that argument is not a real argument: if they take some then change it to the point it can no longer be merged in the original code base then it has no point in residing in that code base because it lacks interoperability! So what you're saying is: "I can't use this with my other stuff because it's not usable with that other stuff". That's a circular argument.
So, you seem to be very weak in your attempts to argue pro-GPL/FSF. I'm not sure I will read the rest of your post.
Let's take a look at some statements form the Church Of Stallman and the cult of Linux fanboysim:
"Either you share your code forcifully and virally with us OR you're not 'free as in freedom' "
False dichotomy. ( -- See: BSD license)
"Proprietary code harms the world"
We have reasons to believe the premise is flawed. ( -- A lot of proprietary code helps a lot of people) Not only that, all it expresses is an opinon.( --- Not what engineers, doctors, finance wizards, etc.think)
"If more people use the GPL, more people will be constrained to use it too, therefore leading to a greater number of free software"
Unproven assumption. In fact, there are counterexamples. ( --- No support in Real World events. Case in point: Apple, LLVM, etc.)
I could go on and on about this meme the Linux fanboyism freeloader jerk-offs believe.
Did you know that the Linux fanboyism cult movement actually believes that it's legitimate for a carpenter or owner of a metal shop to spend thousands of dollars on power tools, while expecting to pay absolutely nothing for software power tools? I find that amazing...
GPL is like promoting free speech until someone saids something YOU don't like.
That is a brilliant way to put it!...I think that by now we've accumulated enough Real World evidence about how the GPL has utterly failed in its lofty goals of virally forcing everyone to merge code with the FSF and other projects. Now, people might point to the Linux kernel. But Linux is just for servers. It's not in desktops. It's not in other areas (scientific, financial, engineering, medical, aeronautics, defense, etc.). Why?
Because, for many years now, people have made a significant investment - with hefty returns in many cases - in the Windows platform. And they'll continue to do it. They will pay the price the free market stipulates for the proprietary OS, but they will not pay the price the FSF and the Linux fanboys jerk-offs would like to see them pay - throw away your intellectual effort and simply "share", whilst risking bankrupcy.
This fundamental misunderstanding of cost-benefit and risk analysis from the Linux fanboys is what keeps them at the margin. Even if you love Unix, you can enjoy a better Unix experience with the Mac OS. Also, Linux -i.e., IBM - succeeded in running Sun out of the market. Great! I'm really excited about the possibilty of a medical equipment running Windows, instead of Sun's OS.
To add insult to injury, we're witnessing software engineers develop systems software that intends to dump the GPL/FSF while still - and this is important - adhering to an open source license - but one that's not viral.
No it isn't. If you think about it for a minute, no other distros picked up on their packaging technology. The one thousand claimed distros that did are just...little Debians, not really forks or anything creative (but that I mean - it's just some scaled down version of Debian).
Debian's packaging system almost brought them down to a halt. I remember a few years ago we discussed this on/. The more packages Debian got, the more they delayed their releases.
OTOH, if you look at the rpm tech, it got picked up by different distros (amongst others, the "big distros" SuSE and Mandriva), but they changed and tweaked it. So the technology that got picked up by different distros is rpm, not apt.
It doesn't promote any diversity. If it's the same distro, then the binaries are in the same place, the same configuration files are there. It's just a low-hanging fruit for the black hats. Much more so Debian, that had their servers cracked open not once, but twice.
Some distros try a different business model for Linux, one that is not for freeloaders. Linux fanboys love freeloading, hence no Linux apps. Anyways, I digress. Try Mandriva PowerPack (paid version). It ships with proprietary codecs. This makes some fanboys go insane, but then again we don't see those fanboys helping out with any codec, because signal processing is tough shit, and not the kind of stuff bashers and repackagers can wrap their head around. They better stick to repackaging other people's software in.debs.
The reason OSX is becoming popular is because now a significant fraction of "computers" (the ones from Apple that the cool people buy) happen to run OSX by default. This is despite the fact that 90% of the boxed software you can get at best buy will not work on it
Those thin Mac books are damn cool. Period. 90% of the 90% software that Windoze users feel they need to install is just some cheap shit they want because Windows ships with crippleware, whereas Mac users are ready to have fun from the get go.
Also, 50% of the 90% of those 90% is just a bunch of people writing low quality software that does exactly the same as the next guy's software. That they can charge for it and make a buck is a beautiful thing.
Or, option 4, they mean that Debian is the most useful distro because everyone who wants to make a new distro based on it can easily do so.
And I find it amusing that you use circular arguments ("Debian is useful because many people use it") and then go about bitching about another guy's comment, as if you had presented one. Try. Logic.
And being used by a number of other distros has nothing to do with market penetration or quality
Exactly. No real innovation has come out of Debian. In fact, their situation was so messed up, they needed a millionaire do-gooder to sort their mess up.
From the technical standpoint, Red Hat is the distro that advanced Linux the most. That's a fact.
Can't the Manning fund simply set up and announce a bank account? Today, you can wire money all over the world. There are dozens of US banks that will take money shipped from overseas, for example. And I imagine the US banking system allows eletronic transfer between banks from and to private citizens's acounts, no? Strictly speaking, this is PayPal's double loss (financial and PR - because it does look ugly that they should mingle in politics).
Hey Anon, you just made me realize something: say IBM uses Watson-derived tech to put searches into our phones, using our voices? In that scenario, Google is not so cutting edge.
In the future, they be just a company selling phone (as the other search engines get better), or a company selling data (like Google Street View).
The GOOG thinks they're eternal. But we know the truth: only IBM is eternal.;-)
Google has done *nothing* innovative with Google Docs. People and firms haven't switched their trusted document flow to Google. Why? Because it sucks, and it is crippled by comparison. Can anyone beat Microsoft Access in having a SQL database a mere puny little mortal can set up in days? Nope. No thanks to Google. Can we do crazy things, like use the spreadsheet etc using, say, Python to integrate Gmail, the Spreadsheet and the Calendar, Google Maps data, embed a video into a doc, create logic crazy rules to analyze my Maps data, churn it out to the spreadsheet, and automagically produce a PDF with the new info? That is to say, can I mash up data (which would be not only numbers in a spreadsheet) into an awsome web app that can take care of all my needs, without me being a a super-geek, and make my robot serve me coffee, and integrate it with my cell phone? No, I don't think so (not without becoming the King of Pain, probably). So, GOOG, you're so lame.
Google News: thank you GOOG, for buying that huge Usenet archive and turning into an incontrollable spam shit-vortex, to the point even reading comp.lang.whatever is too much of a chore, to the point the new kids think PHP forums, all with expiring dates (for real, sites die), are way better than distributing messages via a protocol (NNTP). Gee, those Usenet engineers of old were smart!
Googe sites: just looks blah. Your web site will look like teh sux0r (total suckage). And, to belabor the point, once again: a mere mortal can't fuse all the Google Goodness into an easy web mash up thingo. Wait a minute...Aren't you supposed to be *super* smart people? Because you don't look smart when you do nothing really cutting edge with the technology you already have. Gee, GOOG...
APIs: don't you have a gazillion geeks working in the GOOG? Can't we have APIs in StandardML?:-) Heh. BTW, are you seriously going to pretend C# doesn't exist? Will you forsake all the Goodness Micro$oft has bestowed upon us, like the beloved F# language they bequeathed? Java is so fucking 90s it's not even funny, Google.
Social networking: you really didn't give a shit about Orkut (well, the name didn't help), did you? It is way behind the curve and it will die a slow death. How smart is that, Google, after the Facebook e-mail? That has got to hurt.
Noise: Google is getting to be noisy, like searching a needle in a haystack. I use other search engines too, suck as Yippy (retarded name for the ex-Clusty, i.e., they present info in clusters, get it?), and Duckduckgo (less noise) to search for things like "what is Bing". They also care about privacy, while TEH GOOG is in bed with insurance empires, are you not?
All in all, the GOOG did not turn up to be the company the Internet Digerati hyped about in these past years. Google is pretty much just same-o, same-o.
Add 6 million Ukranians (in something they call "the forgotten Holocaust", known as Holodomor), in a soviet-engineered famine of an entire country, and 2 million Germans, all courtesy of Josef Stalin. 100,000 due to operations of the Polish NKVD.
Slashdot Mirror
I always wanted the 15C. A guy in my Physics class had one. When I offered to buy it from him, he said initially yes, but then he became attached to it because I told him it was a piece of art.
IIRC, its numerics algorithms were designed, at least in part, by renowned numerical analyst/expert Prof. William Kahan.
Your comparison is stupidly arrogant (if such a thing exists...) Let me draw it for you: a chainsaw to a common saw. They are built for different things. You don't need Mathematica when you just want to simulate scenarios for a down payment in front of the salesman in the dealership.
That would be moronic. It would show instantly that you don't grok the 12C. That you live up in the clouds. That you can't cook. That you don't get pussy. That you don't have real money. It means you're an instant goner.
Also, you can't shove Mathematica in your pocket. It's portable, it's bug-free, and it delivers.
This calculator is like a screwdriver: a perfect fit for the task.
The Platinum shipped with a bug. The 12C...well, there are no bugs.
RPN is great. Once you get used to it, you never look back. BTW, RPN is what the Forth programming language uses.
When doing financial calculations or shopping I always take it with me. Also to the bank. It creates an instant bonding between you and the manager (those initiated in HP 12C's RPN).
HP calculators, IIRC, were used to calculate the orbits in some early space program missions (YouTube). I think it's safe to say that the 12C is more numerically trustworthy than some Pentiums that came out....
A trained scientist/engineer can usually make the move into business/management later in life.
This is if you're an engineer, a field in which you can play all bases involving manufacturing a product or delivering a service. Think now of a geophysicist, or a marine biologist. There might be money to be made in those fields as an entrepreneur, but they will demand going down the unbeaten path. That being the case, it's a much harder sell going to your bank manager for credit.
Besides, as as you say, the sort of mathematics involved in putting the average business model on a spreadsheet is - let's be frank - a child's play compared to real rawhide math, such as the kind a physicist needs. Also, the kind of investment and supply chain is very well developed in the engineering field. But imagine what that would be like if your field was deep water marine biology...!
There's a book called "My Life as a Quant" which is an autobiography by a physicist that ends up working for Wall Street (doing "quantitative modelling", hence the term). He tell of the hardships of the academic career, the never ending supply of nigh-insuperable walls he always had to climb, only to lay flat on his face, even without decent work/pay opportunities.
Turns out he made ton of money on Wall Street. It's no wonder so many turn to finance.Pretty interesting read.
http://www.ederman.com/new/index.html
About what you wrote: I agree 100% with you.
Scientists are badly paid everywhere.
My dad's a scientist and he tells me colleagues of his, in Germany, where pretty pissed off because they didn't make much more money than the skilled technician, but the responsibilities of a scientist...well, no comparison.
BTW, believe it or not, my mother (also a scientist) did her master's with a Nobel laureate in her field. She's a doctor and she always made a lot less money than, say, her neurologist best friend, who didn't have a research career. I've never seen anybody work as hard as she did...I mean really...Countless weekends at the lab. Many, many week days of coming home very, very late. For years, she would put out very long hours (in fact, my dad worked alongside her with the same intensity too). This compiled with a high dose of stress due to the pressure to publish or perish, while getting nagged by the bureaucrats that distributed the grants.
Today, she absolutely hates the academic institution. She had breast cancer and retired (she's doing very well) and it's like she went on vacation.
The fact of the matter is that scientists are treated as a bunch of stupid morons by the political establishment, because they will work for little money just out of love for science. But this will inevitably backfire. For instance, you don't see many doctors going into a research-only career. IMHO, that bad. Physics departments have ever dwindling numbers (should we say asymptotic?) of graduates...
Research supported by public money is research that filters back to society, unhindered by the slew of stupid patents for every insignificant little thing such as we see in the private sector. It is the type of research that private enterprises cannot and will not pursue...investigating phenomenons that as of now have no practical application, but that in the future may become a part of our daily lives. There are many examples, such as lasers, retroviridae, number theory, etc. Society needs basic research.
Well, forgive me for not being a little worm inside your head, watching your every thought. I'm sorry that I pointed out the logical flaws in what you stated, and now you are angry.
And, yes, attack me and say I'm "pro-Microsoft". Actually, I do like Microsoft, and I do like Apple. Being a Linux user since, I dunno, 98, I find it still very, very aggravating and horribly buggy. In fact, Mac OS X and WIndows have gotten to a point that they beat Linux. Linux is behind the curve in tech.
I'm pro-Good Code (and BTW, there are areas like "formal" driver verification in which Microsoft is light years ahead of Linux.). And actually, what I really like is the free market, where one gets to pick and choose excellent software, as opposed to being restricted to a small number of really shitty apps that don't do half of what people expect. Just look around you: everywhere, in every industry - do you see Linux (except running servers)? Exactly, no Linux. Linux doesn't exist except as infrastructure software. That is what it will always be, because you CANT RUN A BUSINESS BASED ON LINUX, UNLESS IT'S SOME KIND OF WEB SERVICE THING. Or you dual-license, which is lame excuse for "proprietary".
...You mean, like, IBM ?! You mean Red Hat (stocks up this week, all thanks to their proprietary per-seat licennsing, just like *all* the other players...)
Geez, seriously delusional...Get some info in your brain.
The GPL protects the *freedom of the code*, not the freedom of developers.
(...)
I really can not fathom that this logic still eludes people.
"Freedom" is a concept that only applies to humans!
For instance, can your electrical appliances be considered your slaves, that is, "not free"? I hope you see how ridiculous that line of reasoning is...
'I really can not fathom that this logic still eludes people'. ;-)
BSD isn't bad per se, but it allows a 'bad player' like Microsoft to modify standards in ways that break interoperability.
This factually wrong. First of all, if there is in fact a standard than Microsoft doesn't modify it at will, because most likely it will be issue buy a body of experts (W3C, ISO, POSIX, etc.) If it's a standard owned by Microsoft well, then, you're damn right they can change it.
Besides, that argument is not a real argument: if they take some then change it to the point it can no longer be merged in the original code base then it has no point in residing in that code base because it lacks interoperability! So what you're saying is: "I can't use this with my other stuff because it's not usable with that other stuff". That's a circular argument.
So, you seem to be very weak in your attempts to argue pro-GPL/FSF. I'm not sure I will read the rest of your post.
Let's take a look at some statements form the Church Of Stallman and the cult of Linux fanboysim:
"Either you share your code forcifully and virally with us OR you're not 'free as in freedom' "
False dichotomy. ( -- See: BSD license)
"Proprietary code harms the world"
We have reasons to believe the premise is flawed. ( -- A lot of proprietary code helps a lot of people)
Not only that, all it expresses is an opinon.( --- Not what engineers, doctors, finance wizards, etc.think)
"If more people use the GPL, more people will be constrained to use it too, therefore leading to a greater number of free software"
Unproven assumption. In fact, there are counterexamples. ( --- No support in Real World events. Case in point: Apple, LLVM, etc.)
I could go on and on about this meme the Linux fanboyism freeloader jerk-offs believe.
Did you know that the Linux fanboyism cult movement actually believes that it's legitimate for a carpenter or owner of a metal shop to spend thousands of dollars on power tools, while expecting to pay absolutely nothing for software power tools? I find that amazing...
CODE = need not eat
PEOPLE = gotta eat something
GPL is like promoting free speech until someone saids something YOU don't like.
That is a brilliant way to put it! ...I think that by now we've accumulated enough Real World evidence about how the GPL has utterly failed in its lofty goals of virally forcing everyone to merge code with the FSF and other projects. Now, people might point to the Linux kernel. But Linux is just for servers. It's not in desktops. It's not in other areas (scientific, financial, engineering, medical, aeronautics, defense, etc.). Why?
Because, for many years now, people have made a significant investment - with hefty returns in many cases - in the Windows platform. And they'll continue to do it. They will pay the price the free market stipulates for the proprietary OS, but they will not pay the price the FSF and the Linux fanboys jerk-offs would like to see them pay - throw away your intellectual effort and simply "share", whilst risking bankrupcy.
This fundamental misunderstanding of cost-benefit and risk analysis from the Linux fanboys is what keeps them at the margin. Even if you love Unix, you can enjoy a better Unix experience with the Mac OS. Also, Linux -i.e., IBM - succeeded in running Sun out of the market. Great! I'm really excited about the possibilty of a medical equipment running Windows, instead of Sun's OS.
To add insult to injury, we're witnessing software engineers develop systems software that intends to dump the GPL/FSF while still - and this is important - adhering to an open source license - but one that's not viral.
"Stable" in Debian does not mean the same as, say, when FreeBSD says "stable".
"Stable" in Debian means "stalled."
No it isn't. If you think about it for a minute, no other distros picked up on their packaging technology. The one thousand claimed distros that did are just...little Debians, not really forks or anything creative (but that I mean - it's just some scaled down version of Debian).
Debian's packaging system almost brought them down to a halt. I remember a few years ago we discussed this on /. The more packages Debian got, the more they delayed their releases.
OTOH, if you look at the rpm tech, it got picked up by different distros (amongst others, the "big distros" SuSE and Mandriva), but they changed and tweaked it. So the technology that got picked up by different distros is rpm, not apt.
It doesn't promote any diversity. If it's the same distro, then the binaries are in the same place, the same configuration files are there. It's just a low-hanging fruit for the black hats. Much more so Debian, that had their servers cracked open not once, but twice.
Some distros try a different business model for Linux, one that is not for freeloaders. Linux fanboys love freeloading, hence no Linux apps. Anyways, I digress. Try Mandriva PowerPack (paid version). It ships with proprietary codecs. This makes some fanboys go insane, but then again we don't see those fanboys helping out with any codec, because signal processing is tough shit, and not the kind of stuff bashers and repackagers can wrap their head around. They better stick to repackaging other people's software in .debs.
The reason OSX is becoming popular is because now a significant fraction of "computers" (the ones from Apple that the cool people buy) happen to run OSX by default. This is despite the fact that 90% of the boxed software you can get at best buy will not work on it
Those thin Mac books are damn cool. Period.
90% of the 90% software that Windoze users feel they need to install is just some cheap shit they want because Windows ships with crippleware, whereas Mac users are ready to have fun from the get go.
Also, 50% of the 90% of those 90% is just a bunch of people writing low quality software that does exactly the same as the next guy's software. That they can charge for it and make a buck is a beautiful thing.
Or, option 4, they mean that Debian is the most useful distro because everyone who wants to make a new distro based on it can easily do so.
And I find it amusing that you use circular arguments ("Debian is useful because many people use it") and then go about bitching about another guy's comment, as if you had presented one. Try. Logic.
And being used by a number of other distros has nothing to do with market penetration or quality
Exactly. No real innovation has come out of Debian. In fact, their situation was so messed up, they needed a millionaire do-gooder to sort their mess up.
From the technical standpoint, Red Hat is the distro that advanced Linux the most. That's a fact.
Can't the Manning fund simply set up and announce a bank account? Today, you can wire money all over the world. There are dozens of US banks that will take money shipped from overseas, for example. And I imagine the US banking system allows eletronic transfer between banks from and to private citizens's acounts, no?
Strictly speaking, this is PayPal's double loss (financial and PR - because it does look ugly that they should mingle in politics).
Hey Anon, you just made me realize something: say IBM uses Watson-derived tech to put searches into our phones, using our voices? In that scenario, Google is not so cutting edge.
In the future, they be just a company selling phone (as the other search engines get better), or a company selling data (like Google Street View).
The GOOG thinks they're eternal. But we know the truth: only IBM is eternal. ;-)
Currently my favorite too. Less noise.
I present my case:
Google has done *nothing* innovative with Google Docs. People and firms haven't switched their trusted document flow to Google. Why? Because it sucks, and it is crippled by comparison. Can anyone beat Microsoft Access in having a SQL database a mere puny little mortal can set up in days? Nope. No thanks to Google. Can we do crazy things, like use the spreadsheet etc using, say, Python to integrate Gmail, the Spreadsheet and the Calendar, Google Maps data, embed a video into a doc, create logic crazy rules to analyze my Maps data, churn it out to the spreadsheet, and automagically produce a PDF with the new info? That is to say, can I mash up data (which would be not only numbers in a spreadsheet) into an awsome web app that can take care of all my needs, without me being a a super-geek, and make my robot serve me coffee, and integrate it with my cell phone? No, I don't think so (not without becoming the King of Pain, probably). So, GOOG, you're so lame.
Google News: thank you GOOG, for buying that huge Usenet archive and turning into an incontrollable spam shit-vortex, to the point even reading comp.lang.whatever is too much of a chore, to the point the new kids think PHP forums, all with expiring dates (for real, sites die), are way better than distributing messages via a protocol (NNTP). Gee, those Usenet engineers of old were smart!
Googe sites: just looks blah. Your web site will look like teh sux0r (total suckage). And, to belabor the point, once again: a mere mortal can't fuse all the Google Goodness into an easy web mash up thingo. Wait a minute...Aren't you supposed to be *super* smart people? Because you don't look smart when you do nothing really cutting edge with the technology you already have. Gee, GOOG...
APIs: don't you have a gazillion geeks working in the GOOG? Can't we have APIs in StandardML? :-) Heh. BTW, are you seriously going to pretend C# doesn't exist? Will you forsake all the Goodness Micro$oft has bestowed upon us, like the beloved F# language they bequeathed? Java is so fucking 90s it's not even funny, Google.
Social networking: you really didn't give a shit about Orkut (well, the name didn't help), did you? It is way behind the curve and it will die a slow death. How smart is that, Google, after the Facebook e-mail? That has got to hurt.
Noise: Google is getting to be noisy, like searching a needle in a haystack. I use other search engines too, suck as Yippy (retarded name for the ex-Clusty, i.e., they present info in clusters, get it?), and Duckduckgo (less noise) to search for things like "what is Bing". They also care about privacy, while TEH GOOG is in bed with insurance empires, are you not?
All in all, the GOOG did not turn up to be the company the Internet Digerati hyped about in these past years. Google is pretty much just same-o, same-o.
Add 6 million Ukranians (in something they call "the forgotten Holocaust", known as Holodomor), in a soviet-engineered famine of an entire country, and 2 million Germans, all courtesy of Josef Stalin. 100,000 due to operations of the Polish NKVD.
http://www.ukemonde.com/genocide/margolisholocaust.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_operation_of_the_NKVD