1. The earth has been much warmer than this for the majority of its history 2. The earth is coming out of a ice age that ended 10,000 years ago 3. Climate changes radically throughout the geologic record 4. Mammals, including 6 billion people and 100 billion livestock, exhale CO2
Various groups advocate, to stop the climate from changing, the banning of fossil fuels, forcing consumers to use only items produced within 100 miles, stopping the export of food, products, medicines, forcing populations out of mega-cities, and ending global distribution of goods.
The end result of which is the total destruction of the worlds economy and the loss of roughly one half of the world population and its livestock. Bingo.
The fact is the climate changes. Rather than waste effort in a vain attempt to stop it, goverments should be planning on how to adapt to it.
The NSA has monitored every international call since the 1950s and the cold war to the limits of their technology. The NSA can legally monitor these calls. By extension, if a US citizen calls or receives a call from an entitiy that the NSA can legally monitor, the NSA can monitor the citizen without any warrant or court order. The FISA rules actually provide greater limits than what existed the last 40 years. Shoot, ECHELON in the 1990s used the NSA to monitor domestic calls based on that alone, the government has the power to do this based on presidential order.
Politically, its a winning issue for a president. The Democrats appear to be just as soft on terrorism as they are on domestic crime, and the GOP is able to say they will "do whatever it takes" to protect the nation.
The fact is that the US Congress is abdicating its power (power abhors a vaccuum). They watch. They express "concern". They are "troubled". But they never ever put themselves at political risk and exert their power in the form of legislation.
Environmentally sensitive execs ruining the ozone with personal jumbo jets is hypocritical. Turning over web usage data to the police without a warrant is bad. Halting the free flow of information on behalf of a totalitarian regime is evil. Does it occur to anyone that the reason you have a rule to do no evil is because you normal impulse is to do evil?
Google is a glorified direct marketing firm. No more no less. Direct marketing firms all turn to the dark side eventually.
The more I think about, the more I feel that it secularism really crushes people's spirit. It doesn't really matter what people believe, if it makes them happier to believe it. The myths, legends, fairy tales and religions of the world's societies are what gives them their character. Its definitely much more enjoyable than today's bland, secular consumer society.
Moral relativism means just that, relative. It does not mean than you oppress or stamp out everyone's unique belief systems.
I get so tired of MS bias tainting stories. Exactly how is MS's bet on online gaming flawed? Simply because it MS and not Google?
Blizzard has 5 million customers paying $15 per month for a very minimal development cost.
SOE had 500K to 1 million players paying $12 for EQ for a very minimal investment. SOE also had 6-7 expansions during that period at $20-40 per.
Project Entropia is merging online and real world economies into a solid revenue stream of in-game virtual product for real dollars.
IGN and many other "gold sellers" are making millions selling in game virtual currency for real dollars. The Game companies will sure follow with the ability to buy loot from in game vendors and simply charge it to your credit card.
Online persistent gaming is the only medium that will replace passive viewing of content because players driven content is easier and cheaper to deploy than centrally developed content.
SOX, VISA CISP, Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, Mastercard SDP, CA SB1386, HIPAA, and a soon to be flood of personally identifiable legislation.
Google provides zero payment to the content creators. If their is no content to search for their is no advertising revenue at Google. Google's business model depends on the un-compensated work of others.
At the end of the day, Google is nothing more glamorous than a direct marketing firm. That alone is enough to classify them as Evil.
I guess its because WoW is dumbed down mmorpg and has pvp that it attracts names inappropriate to the genre, but I have to say seeing the ubiquitous fotm classes named "gankzjoo" really ruins the immersiveness of the game for me.
Original EQ with the original player base with realistically appropriate fantasy names was immersive enough for me to actually suspend disbelief while in the virtual. Not so with WoW, which makes it less of a game to me.
But I feel his pain. I've used the name katorga for years. Its provenance is interesting, and when I meet someone who understands the translation of the term, its historical meaning, and its historical time, I know I have met the Right Sort.
The feel I get from this article is a company that is not running its IT correctly. I have a hard time thinking that the PWC IT person mentioned is in a major data center but rather a small branch office....
"one domain controller, and it was dying"? Huh. I didn't think you could set up a single PDC?
The previous guy overspent so the company deploys OSS on the fly just because its free? Sounds like poor engineering to me.
Virus attack? How can that be in this day and age? IDS/IPS, Firewalls, email scanning/filtering, and client AV makes virus outbreaks a non-issue for most companies.
Checkpoint firewall (notice, not plural), at 100% so they put another firewill in front of it? Most corporate datacenters have redundant firewalls on each pipe not a single firewall.
Price Waterhouse Cooper is covered by SOX and GLBA, as well as acting as a SOX/GLBA auditor. I am certain that they know "how" to run a datacenter. What is described in the article is a prime example of how not to operate in a professional data environment. I can't imagine that their IT is this poorly managed, but stranger things have happened.
Dvorak's comments make sense to me. Apple is the flashy, style, radical, celebrity, hype, media focus's tech company, and the meticulously cultivate that image. Microsoft is the grey cubicle, work 60 hours a week, flyover country tech company. I associate Apple with "looking cool", and the PC world with "work". Its probably because I have had PC's at almost every job I've hard. We've all had jobs with aging, nasty, dustbunny PCs performing some menial function. You rarely if ever see Mac's in that role unless you are in the publishing/marketing world.
I'm a long time Sun user from sparc1 thru my current F15s, and I think its over. Sun is starting the long decline so familiar to the workstation vendors. Think HP PA-RISC and SGI. Basically, I bought SUN to stay 5 years ahead of the PC technology curve.
Sadly, Sun could not maintain the technology lead and as they move to x86 servers, the argument that low cost x86 systems are 90% as good for half the price starts to be felt. I pay a premium to be ahead of the curve.
OSS is going to canibalize Sun on the software side unless they become a services and integration company of OSS stacks.
Seriously, I never buy anything based on an advertisement (well maybe viral advertising). I decide what I need. I research products that meet that need from reviews, consumer reports, user reviews, and reports from users on enthusiast forums. I research each product from vendors spec sheets and marketing materials.
Basically I seek out the product information based on requirements I define rather than responding to marketing ploys designed to "make me want something".
I find any advertising, TV, print, internet, pop-up, etc. totally irrelevent.
I will actively refuse to do business with anyone who calls me at home or sends direct materials to my email box or fax machine.
Why? OOo from a toolbar means a bloated install for the end user and does not match the spirit of other web-based ajax offerings. Ooo is 1990's technology and paradigm. I would have expected Google to be more forward thinking and develop something similar to writely, a true web-based (thin and light) collaborative writing tool.
Search for Kiko, Num Sum and Writely to get an idea of a web-based office.
Lol, google has yet to produce something I cannot live without. Therefore, exactly how are they going to replace anything?
At the end of the day, I don't want another monthly surcharge that limits me to what google thinks I want. I DO NOT WANT TO BE MARKETED TO at every touch point. I do not want my every action tracked so that google can sell advertising. I do not want to store my data online on someone elses servers, especially someone who tracks everything I do so they can market to me.
At the end of the day, as long as Google is a direct marketing company, they are not going to replace anything on my computer.
Google is currently a marketing firm. If Google moves into the "web desktop" world and continues to be a direct marketeer, they will not please consumers for long. Business users, due to looming privacy and information security laws, will be prohibited from storing PII or other confidential data on 3rd party, public systems.
The one's to watch are firms developing toolsets like those of Salesforce.com and then selling local, turnkey solutions for businesses to host in their own data centers. MS has been talking about a subscription model for a decade now, and they could just as easily move this way.
BUT...hubris is a mighty nemesis. MS's current leadership is focused on monopoly above all else, and this limits their freedom of movement and ability to develop cool stuff for the sake of developing cool stuff. Everything is developed within the prism of how does this reinforce the monopoly. Bring a new breed of internet-savvy,leadership into MS, who can ignore monopoly to develop unbundled, boutique products (high margin, high "it-factor")and you will have a monster on your hands.
To be brutally honest, Google offers me nothing that I just "can't live without". They offer nothing that I have not seen before, although they do have elegent implementations. The best thing I can say about Google is that at least their directmarketing ads are not as annoying as Yahoo!, but at the end of the day they are a direct marketing firm whose sole purpose is to monitor my behavior and bombard me with ads. I despise that business model.
Linux bigotry blinds these folks from reality. Unix vendors such as sun sgi et al, were hardware vendors NOT unix vendors. They prospered because in the 1980's through 1990's they kept their high margin hardware 5 years more advanced than the commodity priced PC market. Example, a Sun Ultra2 had 4.3GB/s memory bandwidth when the best PC's had 512MB/s.
The "workstation" companies began to fail when they could not maintain this technology lead. Why pay Sun's margins for the same basic hardware you can get from the local whitebox shop? Unix and windows don't enter in to it.
IT is shifting from expensive big iron to throw away whitebox clusters.
Linux will succeed because it allows consumers to further commoditize the cost the computing for companies that have the staff to build and maintain their own OSS distributions (Google?). For companies that cannot do this and have to purchase Linux support contracts, its generally equal to or more expensive than Windows.
Moving to x86 has always represented the last gasp for a risc company based on the history of almost all of the other "workstation" vendors of the early 1990s such as Intergraph, SGI, and others.
In the past buyers paid a premium to these vendors to be roughly 5 years ahead of the curve. Example, Sun had 4GB/s memory bandwidth when Dell was limited to 500MB/s. The workstation vendors have not been able to maintain this 5 year lead and have lost market accordingly.
GM averages 200 flaws for every 100 vehicles, one of the highest rates of all of the auto makers. In light of this, I think they need to do everything they can to assist in making their cars more reliable.
If one is concerned about privacy, buy a more reliable vehicle from say....Toyota.
This guy invented BOTH tetraethyl lead (leaded gasoline) and CFCs. Talk about a bad batting average.
Lead addititves started being used in fuel in 1923 and after that date humans have 625 times more lead in our blood than humans from before that date. Atmosperic lead is permantent.
CFCs have an almost unlimited lifespan so even though we have stopped using CFC's, the CFC we did use will be up there forever causing destruction of the ozone layer.
Face it, technology aside, Google is a direct marketing firm. They have the same business model and the jerk companies that bombard consumers with annoying direct marketing calls.
The cool technology Google builds is simply there to draw users to their sites so that they can market and collect information.
Once the bloom is off the rose and their stock prices normalize to a realistic level based on earnings, the shareholders will demand results no matter what, and at that point the pressure to "make money, even if it means being evil" will be too great.
IMO, Google has the potential to be worse than MS because they want monopoly control over access to information, which I consider much more threatening than monopoly control over what word processor I use.
Plain and simple, google is a direct marketing firm. They are just as slimey imo as an other direct marketing firm. That means they collect every bit of information the can on the customer. They intrude as often as possible in order to sell more ad space, and they generally become annoying over time.
As much as I like their services, in the long run Google will "be evil". Just wait for the stock to drop to normal levels and the company has to really work to move ads.
Slashdot Mirror
Egyptians
Chinese
Mayans
Incans
olmec
Norsemen
Christopher Columbus even knew the earth was round...
* Decreasing crop yields in the developing and developed world
This is inaccurate. Yields are 100 times what they were 100 years ago.
* Tripling of poor harvests in Europe and Russia
300% times what? Collectivization anyone?
* Large-scale displacement of people in north Africa from desertification
This started happening 10K years ago when the region turned from green and temperate to desert.
* Up to 2.8bn people at risk of water shortage
What? shortage is already here due to overpopulation and failing countries
* 97% loss of coral reefs
Reefs are already doomed for other reasons. Increased sea levels will simply finish the remainder off.
* Total loss of summer Arctic sea ice causing extinction of the polar bear and the walrus
Only to be replaced with growth in population of more general climate bears.
* Spread of malaria in Africa and north America
Huh. Malaria has been endemic in every tropical climate for ever
1. The earth has been much warmer than this for the majority of its history
2. The earth is coming out of a ice age that ended 10,000 years ago
3. Climate changes radically throughout the geologic record
4. Mammals, including 6 billion people and 100 billion livestock, exhale CO2
Various groups advocate, to stop the climate from changing, the banning of fossil fuels, forcing consumers to use only items produced within 100 miles, stopping the export of food, products, medicines, forcing populations out of mega-cities, and ending global distribution of goods.
The end result of which is the total destruction of the worlds economy and the loss of roughly one half of the world population and its livestock. Bingo.
The fact is the climate changes. Rather than waste effort in a vain attempt to stop it, goverments should be planning on how to adapt to it.
The NSA has monitored every international call since the 1950s and the cold war to the limits of their technology. The NSA can legally monitor these calls. By extension, if a US citizen calls or receives a call from an entitiy that the NSA can legally monitor, the NSA can monitor the citizen without any warrant or court order. The FISA rules actually provide greater limits than what existed the last 40 years. Shoot, ECHELON in the 1990s used the NSA to monitor domestic calls based on that alone, the government has the power to do this based on presidential order.
Politically, its a winning issue for a president. The Democrats appear to be just as soft on terrorism as they are on domestic crime, and the GOP is able to say they will "do whatever it takes" to protect the nation.
The fact is that the US Congress is abdicating its power (power abhors a vaccuum). They watch. They express "concern". They are "troubled". But they never ever put themselves at political risk and exert their power in the form of legislation.
Environmentally sensitive execs ruining the ozone with personal jumbo jets is hypocritical. Turning over web usage data to the police without a warrant is bad. Halting the free flow of information on behalf of a totalitarian regime is evil. Does it occur to anyone that the reason you have a rule to do no evil is because you normal impulse is to do evil?
Google is a glorified direct marketing firm. No more no less. Direct marketing firms all turn to the dark side eventually.
The more I think about, the more I feel that it secularism really crushes people's spirit. It doesn't really matter what people believe, if it makes them happier to believe it. The myths, legends, fairy tales and religions of the world's societies are what gives them their character. Its definitely much more enjoyable than today's bland, secular consumer society.
Moral relativism means just that, relative. It does not mean than you oppress or stamp out everyone's unique belief systems.
Before falling into the gaga over stemcells, read the literature. Stemcells don't actually work.
I get so tired of MS bias tainting stories. Exactly how is MS's bet on online gaming flawed? Simply because it MS and not Google?
Blizzard has 5 million customers paying $15 per month for a very minimal development cost.
SOE had 500K to 1 million players paying $12 for EQ for a very minimal investment. SOE also had 6-7 expansions during that period at $20-40 per.
Project Entropia is merging online and real world economies into a solid revenue stream of in-game virtual product for real dollars.
IGN and many other "gold sellers" are making millions selling in game virtual currency for real dollars. The Game companies will sure follow with the ability to buy loot from in game vendors and simply charge it to your credit card.
Online persistent gaming is the only medium that will replace passive viewing of content because players driven content is easier and cheaper to deploy than centrally developed content.
SOX, VISA CISP, Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, Mastercard SDP, CA SB1386, HIPAA, and a soon to be flood of personally identifiable legislation.
We are having to lock everything down.
Google provides zero payment to the content creators. If their is no content to search for their is no advertising revenue at Google. Google's business model depends on the un-compensated work of others.
At the end of the day, Google is nothing more glamorous than a direct marketing firm. That alone is enough to classify them as Evil.
I don't click on ANY ads from google. go figure.
I guess its because WoW is dumbed down mmorpg and has pvp that it attracts names inappropriate to the genre, but I have to say seeing the ubiquitous fotm classes named "gankzjoo" really ruins the immersiveness of the game for me.
Original EQ with the original player base with realistically appropriate fantasy names was immersive enough for me to actually suspend disbelief while in the virtual. Not so with WoW, which makes it less of a game to me.
But I feel his pain. I've used the name katorga for years. Its provenance is interesting, and when I meet someone who understands the translation of the term, its historical meaning, and its historical time, I know I have met the Right Sort.
The feel I get from this article is a company that is not running its IT correctly. I have a hard time thinking that the PWC IT person mentioned is in a major data center but rather a small branch office....
"one domain controller, and it was dying"? Huh. I didn't think you could set up a single PDC?
The previous guy overspent so the company deploys OSS on the fly just because its free? Sounds like poor engineering to me.
Virus attack? How can that be in this day and age? IDS/IPS, Firewalls, email scanning/filtering, and client AV makes virus outbreaks a non-issue for most companies.
Checkpoint firewall (notice, not plural), at 100% so they put another firewill in front of it? Most corporate datacenters have redundant firewalls on each pipe not a single firewall.
Price Waterhouse Cooper is covered by SOX and GLBA, as well as acting as a SOX/GLBA auditor. I am certain that they know "how" to run a datacenter. What is described in the article is a prime example of how not to operate in a professional data environment. I can't imagine that their IT is this poorly managed, but stranger things have happened.
Dvorak's comments make sense to me. Apple is the flashy, style, radical, celebrity, hype, media focus's tech company, and the meticulously cultivate that image. Microsoft is the grey cubicle, work 60 hours a week, flyover country tech company. I associate Apple with "looking cool", and the PC world with "work". Its probably because I have had PC's at almost every job I've hard. We've all had jobs with aging, nasty, dustbunny PCs performing some menial function. You rarely if ever see Mac's in that role unless you are in the publishing/marketing world.
I'm a long time Sun user from sparc1 thru my current F15s, and I think its over. Sun is starting the long decline so familiar to the workstation vendors. Think HP PA-RISC and SGI. Basically, I bought SUN to stay 5 years ahead of the PC technology curve.
Sadly, Sun could not maintain the technology lead and as they move to x86 servers, the argument that low cost x86 systems are 90% as good for half the price starts to be felt. I pay a premium to be ahead of the curve.
OSS is going to canibalize Sun on the software side unless they become a services and integration company of OSS stacks.
Seriously, I never buy anything based on an advertisement (well maybe viral advertising). I decide what I need. I research products that meet that need from reviews, consumer reports, user reviews, and reports from users on enthusiast forums. I research each product from vendors spec sheets and marketing materials.
Basically I seek out the product information based on requirements I define rather than responding to marketing ploys designed to "make me want something".
I find any advertising, TV, print, internet, pop-up, etc. totally irrelevent.
I will actively refuse to do business with anyone who calls me at home or sends direct materials to my email box or fax machine.
Why? OOo from a toolbar means a bloated install for the end user and does not match the spirit of other web-based ajax offerings. Ooo is 1990's technology and paradigm. I would have expected Google to be more forward thinking and develop something similar to writely, a true web-based (thin and light) collaborative writing tool.
Search for Kiko, Num Sum and Writely to get an idea of a web-based office.
Lol, google has yet to produce something I cannot live without. Therefore, exactly how are they going to replace anything?
At the end of the day, I don't want another monthly surcharge that limits me to what google thinks I want. I DO NOT WANT TO BE MARKETED TO at every touch point. I do not want my every action tracked so that google can sell advertising. I do not want to store my data online on someone elses servers, especially someone who tracks everything I do so they can market to me.
At the end of the day, as long as Google is a direct marketing company, they are not going to replace anything on my computer.
Google is currently a marketing firm. If Google moves into the "web desktop" world and continues to be a direct marketeer, they will not please consumers for long. Business users, due to looming privacy and information security laws, will be prohibited from storing PII or other confidential data on 3rd party, public systems.
The one's to watch are firms developing toolsets like those of Salesforce.com and then selling local, turnkey solutions for businesses to host in their own data centers. MS has been talking about a subscription model for a decade now, and they could just as easily move this way.
BUT...hubris is a mighty nemesis. MS's current leadership is focused on monopoly above all else, and this limits their freedom of movement and ability to develop cool stuff for the sake of developing cool stuff. Everything is developed within the prism of how does this reinforce the monopoly. Bring a new breed of internet-savvy,leadership into MS, who can ignore monopoly to develop unbundled, boutique products (high margin, high "it-factor")and you will have a monster on your hands.
To be brutally honest, Google offers me nothing that I just "can't live without". They offer nothing that I have not seen before, although they do have elegent implementations. The best thing I can say about Google is that at least their directmarketing ads are not as annoying as Yahoo!, but at the end of the day they are a direct marketing firm whose sole purpose is to monitor my behavior and bombard me with ads. I despise that business model.
Linux bigotry blinds these folks from reality. Unix vendors such as sun sgi et al, were hardware vendors NOT unix vendors. They prospered because in the 1980's through 1990's they kept their high margin hardware 5 years more advanced than the commodity priced PC market. Example, a Sun Ultra2 had 4.3GB/s memory bandwidth when the best PC's had 512MB/s.
The "workstation" companies began to fail when they could not maintain this technology lead. Why pay Sun's margins for the same basic hardware you can get from the local whitebox shop? Unix and windows don't enter in to it.
IT is shifting from expensive big iron to throw away whitebox clusters.
Linux will succeed because it allows consumers to further commoditize the cost the computing for companies that have the staff to build and maintain their own OSS distributions (Google?). For companies that cannot do this and have to purchase Linux support contracts, its generally equal to or more expensive than Windows.
Moving to x86 has always represented the last gasp for a risc company based on the history of almost all of the other "workstation" vendors of the early 1990s such as Intergraph, SGI, and others.
In the past buyers paid a premium to these vendors to be roughly 5 years ahead of the curve. Example, Sun had 4GB/s memory bandwidth when Dell was limited to 500MB/s. The workstation vendors have not been able to maintain this 5 year lead and have lost market accordingly.
GM averages 200 flaws for every 100 vehicles, one of the highest rates of all of the auto makers. In light of this, I think they need to do everything they can to assist in making their cars more reliable.
If one is concerned about privacy, buy a more reliable vehicle from say....Toyota.
This guy invented BOTH tetraethyl lead (leaded gasoline) and CFCs. Talk about a bad batting average.
Lead addititves started being used in fuel in 1923 and after that date humans have 625 times more lead in our blood than humans from before that date. Atmosperic lead is permantent.
CFCs have an almost unlimited lifespan so even though we have stopped using CFC's, the CFC we did use will be up there forever causing destruction of the ozone layer.
Thanks again Mr. Midgley.
Face it, technology aside, Google is a direct marketing firm. They have the same business model and the jerk companies that bombard consumers with annoying direct marketing calls.
The cool technology Google builds is simply there to draw users to their sites so that they can market and collect information.
Once the bloom is off the rose and their stock prices normalize to a realistic level based on earnings, the shareholders will demand results no matter what, and at that point the pressure to "make money, even if it means being evil" will be too great.
IMO, Google has the potential to be worse than MS because they want monopoly control over access to information, which I consider much more threatening than monopoly control over what word processor I use.
Plain and simple, google is a direct marketing firm. They are just as slimey imo as an other direct marketing firm. That means they collect every bit of information the can on the customer. They intrude as often as possible in order to sell more ad space, and they generally become annoying over time.
As much as I like their services, in the long run Google will "be evil". Just wait for the stock to drop to normal levels and the company has to really work to move ads.
Just say no.