The articles would have had more bite if they'd included one or two written from a different perspective.They all come over as the ideas of comfortably-off American professionals doing OK thank you. But if it's true that the coming century will belong to China and perhaps India then Google's eventual fate may just as easily be decided by those outside the USA as those inside it. It would have been interesting to read a SE Asian or Indian journalist's take. After all, in twenty years' time Google could be owned by a foreign corporation.
Just my 2 cents, but Google's dream of becoming the world's information provider doesn't look as if it will come off. People have seen the trap already - no corporation can be trusted, so it's insane to give one that kind of power - and Google's mistaken moves in China have blown off the remaining gloss on Do No Evil. From now on, it may be a much harder grind for them, and if the information issues get too hot they could easily end up being regulated into a corner. The last of the articles alludes to the huge trouble and loss of trust even one hacking scandal could cause them.
The sweet thing about the new Honda Borg is that once you've keyed the lock the car will drive itself to your crib. And if the cops intervene, there'll be no one in it to arrest!
I guess this workaround will be quietly blocked at some stage... until the next workaround emerges. Google are in too deep now, though. Their China venture is a whopping mistake, imho. The company whose business pitch is that we should trust it with the world's information falls at the first hurdle by showing it cannot be trusted with even a part of the world's information if the bribe is large enough.
Some things cannot be fact-checked in any worthwhile way. Their power to move us is precisely that they are an "imaginative re-creation" of something that happened, and by this they show us a greater spiritual or emotional truth than the bald facts baldly stated. On the basis of literal, scientific truth, I'm afraid that any publisher's fact-checker would be duty-bound to reject the US Constitution and demand cuts or rewriting of 90 per cent of the New Testament, including the retitling of the Letters of St Paul to "Letters by an Unknown Author". The miracle of the feeding of the 5000, for example, cannot literally be true, but to its original listeners the story would have contained some very powerful truths.
I'm not sure which is the more nauseating. That the Opera crew (and sundry attorneys and greed-crazed readers) should have failed to notice that "A Million Little Pieces" could not possibly be true in any literal way; or that having had this pointed out to them, they should blame others for their own stupidity then seek to profit from it.
I doubt we'll hear Oprah calling up an archbishop and demanding the withdrawal of the New Testament any time soon. Maybe, shock horror, the world of 2000 years ago had a much more sophisticated understanding of truth and fiction that we do today.
FWIW, I didn't think much of "A Million Little Pieces". It fails to engage. And, yes, publishers are mostly a two-faced, puffed-up crowd, prattling about literature while paying freelance editors and proofreaders not much more than burger-flipping rates then blaming them for foobars that a Harvard professor might easily have missed.
Sorry, but we can't have it both ways. It boils down to the fact that we have all become so self-important that we can't be 'inconvenienced' by waiting to make sure people don't try to kill us.
It might just as easily boil down to the fact that we are too easily scared. A low-level war - which is what the present terrorist threat could be called - would claim a certain number of lives each year if we did only a little to tighten security, but at minimum financial or organizational cost to our way of life. An acceptable price to pay? There is a case for it. A full-scale response - which is what we seem to be falling into - is extremely expensive, extremely disruptive and shafts civil liberties. Oh, and people still get killed anyway. There are arguments on both sides, but voters don't yet seem to have been given much of a chance to express an opinion.
Bear in mind that Gates was speaking at the Davos summit, a cosy club of self-appointed (and probably self-regarding) movers and shakers from around the world. Not a few of these people would trample their grandmother - never mind a few Chinese workers - if they thought there was a buck on the other side of the road. Gates was never going to talk down capitalism, technology or China to an audience like this, no matter which companies are involved.
The one thing all these extremely rich folks seem to take as gospel is that despite the Chinese government backing capitalism and dictorial repression at the same time, China is the future, China is where the money is, China is about to become unimaginably prosperous, etc., etc. Received opinion has said the same before about states that soon after imploded in war, chaos, financial collapse and disaster of one kind or another. For myself, I wouldn't bank on received opinion being right this time either.
Britain is somewhat ahead of the USA in this regard. Because ID checking is legal and accepted at airports, the authorities are keen to introduce it at railway stations, before boarding a train, and on journeys by coach. From there it is only a small step to require some kind of prior notification, so that the police will know who is on a train or coach before it leaves.
I doubt that Gilmore vs Gonzales will look quite so benign if the USA goes down the same route, which it looks like doing. Then, people may find themselves legally obliged to fill out a long form before catching a train or coach to see their folks for the weekend, and wait in a queue for a couple of hours while their luggage is put through a scanner on the platform or roadside.
My reading is that the EU is miffed at the way Microsoft has handled this over the past few days. Microsoft seem to have sent the EU compliance folks the minimum of details while spinning a big press release and publicity bandwagon about what a massive, epoch-making offer they now have on the table. Presumably Microsoft are hoping either to overwhelm the EU via the publicity effect or push the EU into a corner whereby if the EU turn down this "offer" (which is not what Micrsoft were asked to provide) they will look churlish and against the opening up of closed code.
It's all a game. Microsoft don't want to comply if they can avoid it, because they see interoperability as bad for their business. We know that; they know that; and they know we know that. Hence this little charade with thousands of documents and byzantine and no doubt extremely expensive "peak at our code" procedures. Just my 2 cents, but I hope the EU take a tough stance against this attempt to intimidate and manipulate them.
Just my 2 cents, but playing politics isn't going to help Linux, or any other software. There is nothing wrong with looking at ways in which in the GPL2 (or any other licence) could be improved. But buying into the agenda of some of the more far-out ranters and anti-capitalist nutjobs of the free software world isn't going to help anyone, and at the moment they all seem lumped together under the general heading "GPL3" On the contrary, it will make Linux less useful to a lot of folks and put off still more potential users.
Not for the first time, Linux Torvalds is applying a touch to the brakes and suggesting that a little common sense might go a long way. Or that's how I read this, anyway. I guess the ghastly Richard Stallman will just have to continue gnashing and gnuing his teeth. The Linux kernel is absolutely not his kernel.
"How to do what you love" is a rather meretricious title for an essay on work, and in any case life rarely goes according to plan. Who you are is a little more important than what you do, unless you're one of those people whose first and probably only question on social occasions is "What do you do?" This essay omits the other, more significant half of the equation which is "What is the good life?". If I can't make a fair stab at that, chances are slim that a job will save the day. Besides, what someone said about the second question, say, two and a half thousand years ago may be as helpful and inspiring as what the Paul Grahams of this world said yesterday.
Personally, I prefer Steve Jobs' awesome commencement address at Stanford last year. In it, he said "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."
Which neatly shows up the perennial dilemma "truck driver or Nobel scientist - which is more worthwhile?" to be a complete illusion.
From the article: "To put it another way, the entire population of Glasgow could fly to New York and back again and the resulting emissions would still be less than that from devices left in sleep mode."
It's not the entire population of Glasgow flying to New York that worries me. It's the prospect of them coming back again.
Wasting electricity is an expensive pastime, no doubt. But worrying about standby mode is a gnat-bite compared to our hopeless dependence on the motor car and in the UK's case our increasing dependence on importing energy from rather unstable parts of the world. This sounds rather like a typical UK New Labour gambit: encouraging people to feel good citizens while dodging the all the tough questions.
Google doesn't make many mistakes but when it does, boy, are they doozies
I'm not American and I'm not sure I understand. What is a "doozy" and should I be worried if I have one? I'm hoping it isn't the kind of thing I can catch just from using the internet.
This is the perfect example of not understanding "The Debian System". YOU aren't supposed to use unstable. You're not even supposed to use testing. If you don't want to have to fiddle with the system, use "stable". That's what it's for. This is clearly explained in a number of places in the documentation.
Actually, that's the perfect example of why Debian doesn't work for everyone, for stictly my two cents. Not every user is in it to be hectored (an obsession with the Debian way, in full caps) or treated with disdain (must be too stupid to have read any documentation, etc.). Personally, I use Linux to get away from all that stuff about we own your ass so do what we say.
To answer another reply, I now use a mucho tweaked SuSE. Works for me. Any number of other distros, including Debian, may well work better for you, maybe more so now Martin Krafft has given everyone the gift of a full-up guide to Debian.
Kudos to Martin Krafft for writing his book. Many dream but few ever get it together...
That said, I spent most of 2005 running Debian Unstable and Debian Testing on different systems and ended up finding both overrated and generally a disappointmennt. Debian was too demanding of time and needed seemingly endless fiddling around and careful management. It also took a lot of time to set up, though admittedly that is a one-off when an installation is still fresh. More important, the Debian developer community seemed shot through with an obsession with doing things the Debian way, with college-level debates (aka rows), with considerable disdain for new users and with frankly pretty obscure things of little interest to many in the everyday world. Overall, I began to wonder if some of these guys would recognize an end-user if they fell over one and my faith in the Debian way rapidly dwindled.
None of this should detract from Krafft's achievement, though. It's a heck of a good thing to have done. I do find it a little odd that he should recommend that new users try Ubuntu rather than Debian. One is tempted to ask: what's the problem whereby they can't use Debian, then?
For myself, I've now gone back to another distro. It's pretty nearly as capable as Debian, with the difference that its devs are technical experts who confine themselves to delivering what works. A distro that puts out for its users without striking tiresome poses or co-opting its users into politics of some kind is much the more preferable, for me at least.
Cringely seems in a defensive mood, with rather a dull set of ideas. Predictions are meant to be fun. I don't think it matters whether they are precisely correct. Often, the writer gets the details wrong but the general thrust is entirely accurate. Maybe Cringely should have taken a tip from the ancient Persians and written the piece while blind drunk then rewritten it when sober. Maybe he did, and it's taken until mid-January to get over a monster hang-over.
The general approach seems to be that 2006 will be Apple's year, and maybe Sony's if there is a sudden spurt of interest in the cell processor. Everyone else will bide their time (Google), tread water (Microsoft) or go backwards (IBM and the rest of the world, apparently). Boring. And while everyone seems to be talking about the fabled media center, no one seems to have had a good enough sighting yet to provide a coherent description of what it will be like.
I'd love to have heard Cringely expound a little more on Google's shipping-container data centers he is so fond of mentioning, if they exist. And I guess he could have taken a few bets for us aficionados of the 33-1 outsider, like Sun and Novell both face investor-led crises and end up on Wall Street's M&A slab, and someone makes a grab for ATI.
And, on a small note, imho in 2006 Ubuntu have a great opportunity to consolidate their performance and establish themselves as the desktop of choice for Linux people, behind Red Hat and Novell (or what becomes of it) slugging it out in the corporate arena. Or perhaps that should read Red Hat consolidating it's near-monopoly in the corporate arena. Anyone up for a punt on Megacorp Inc. taking a swing at acquiring them?
My take on this: Google already said they won't make their own PC, because they can work with some great hardware partners.
So Apple will soon announce a tablet, a PDA, and a VOIP phone/iPod, each of which will work with the wireless infrastructure that Google is rolling out.
Yup, that is a very interesting idea. How nice it would be not to have to deal with the incumbent cellphone carriers where I live and for whom the term "daylight robbery" could have been coined.
Other speculation is that the play here isn't for a conventional cellphone. It's for VOIP.
A conventional cellphone means that Apple would have to kowtow to all the carriers and their phone would be just one phone among a plethora of other, well-established outfits (Nokia, Moto, Samsung, whoever).
But a VOIP phone using wifi would enable Apple to sidestep being just another player and control the whole thing all the way down the line. Of course there is the minor problem of establishing a huge wifi network, but maybe this is where Google and friends come in, and anyway didn't someone say this is all wild, wild speculation?
Can't recall where I read this. Mabye yesterday on Slashdot:)
The original St Lawrence angered the Prefect of Rome who ordered him to be roasted to death on a grid-iron. Although, according to the sources, St Lawrence faced his death with fortitude and even managed a joke with the executioner - quite a feat, as Roman executioners were probably not known their sense of humour.
I hope that if Google ever do manage to construct a machine that passes the Turing test it will manage a joke instead of a sad sqwark as someone reaches for the Off switch.
The page is upside down
on
Spam is Dead
·
· Score: 1
I don't think the spam problem is declining if you include all forms of unsolicited bulk email. Phishing is a real problem now - ask any bank. In the old phrase, it's not just the quantity it's the quality. Half as much spam that is four times as effective in fooling filters and/or fooling users is not a decline in spam. And would I like young members of my family or my mother to get even one spam a day offering the delights of, say, bestiality? Nope. One spam is too many and no jail is big enough for some of these operators.
I think it's necessary to turn the page with all the graphs on it the other way up. These will show an increase in governmental and IT industry self-satisfaction, cheerleading and (some might say reckless) optimism. I guess they've decided to declare the great spam war won and the problem fading. Except it isn't.
Well the point is they didn't merge (and nor did Apple and IBM), so what else is new.
This sound more like some kind of hopeless, unrequited longing for a beautiful girl. Apple has style and pizzaz and Sun doesn't, but oh how Sun longs for them! The chairman of Sun recently spoke of having an "iPod moment" around something or other, probably a new line of servers or piece of software. It wasn't, but I think we can guess where he was coming from.
So far, malware has been treated as an IT/commercial problem (which is what this article does), but it has become so pervasive and costly that it is also now a political problem. The barely fettered growth of malware - its sheer scale, organization and the amounts of money involved - raises a lot of questions about privacy, international cooperation and what to do about the internet itself. I don't think it's something that the IT industry can tackle on its own. You can have as much protection as you like, but so long as malware outfits can slip through 1001 transnational loopholes and exploit safe-haven jurisdictions there will always be a serious problem.
I don't pretend to know the answers, but waving a copy of Norton Internet Security at the bad boys isn't it, for sure. Perhaps there is an element of deliberate wimping out going on here. The IT industry doesn't want to admit it cannot solve things alone, because it doesn't want politicians and regulators muscling in. And politicians like to pretend that malware is purely an IT problem because they don't want the headache of involvement in sorting out the mess.
As one result, perhaps, domains ending in letters like.ru or.ro can apparently do what they like, and some notorious spammers and phishers remain on Top 50 lists for years without anyone so much as slapping their wrist. In previous centuries, the whole thing was called "piracy" and states tackled it with, erm, "extreme prejudice". Sometimes, I feel they may have been on to something.
If you look at the totality of what Microsoft does, Gates is surely right. IBM is the 800lb gorilla of services (as distinct from software though IBM is huge in that too). Despite his claims about Microsoft just being a lil' old software house now and in future, my guess is that Gates sees services as the big one in the coming years. Yes, Google can hurt Microsoft a bit on the consumer desktop, and so can Apple and others, but the big money is in enterprise business.
If this is correct, then it follows that Microsoft may well have concluded that their cosy world of pay-for software has peaked and will now start to decline no matter what they do, so they are preparing to reposition themselves. Admittedly the great man's sour tone and strange diction don't help.
Sad to say, but a random selection of the thinkers and scientists quoted here didn't do much for me. Many of the ideas seemed rather dull and occasionally pompous as well. These are not new ideas; they are simply ideas that are already in the air. I can come across them on TV, in an upmarket newspaper or good journal or in a hundred books in my local bookstore.
The trouble is that this is a very, very narrow selection of people. It would be more enlightening, perhaps, to choose a much broader selection of people (not only scientists and academic thinkers) from all over the world. It's rather silly to think that scientists can solve all our problems or even ask all the right questions. Even sillier is the notion that we - our culture - have all the answers and need ask no questions outside it. Whether that is also dangerous I cannot say.
The article misses out on a couple of things, perhaps. Einstein also stands out because he was an intensely moral man who had interesting and brave things to say on the sheer mystery of life. He was a highly gifted communicator who wrote well on a wide range of subjects far beyond his own field.
Even if you don't subscribe to the "myth of genius", men of such rounded accomplishment are very rare. Knowledge has expanded so rapidly that it is hard enough to know your own field, let alone know enough worth saying about other fields. Perhaps Einstein's was the last generation that could span, if not all knowledge, then a substantial part of it. We are all specialists these days.
Besides, we now live in a world in which enterprise and individuality of the Einsteinian kind are less appreciated. Since his heyday, so much has been subordinated to the dismal science of economics, the realm where the beancounter is king and inspiration is seen as a shocking waste of tax dollars or corporate profits. Arguably, the closest equivalent to Einstein today is not a scientist but the Dalai Lama, another gifted communicator who understands that knowledge alone is not enough.
Slashdot Mirror
The articles would have had more bite if they'd included one or two written from a different perspective.They all come over as the ideas of comfortably-off American professionals doing OK thank you. But if it's true that the coming century will belong to China and perhaps India then Google's eventual fate may just as easily be decided by those outside the USA as those inside it. It would have been interesting to read a SE Asian or Indian journalist's take. After all, in twenty years' time Google could be owned by a foreign corporation.
Just my 2 cents, but Google's dream of becoming the world's information provider doesn't look as if it will come off. People have seen the trap already - no corporation can be trusted, so it's insane to give one that kind of power - and Google's mistaken moves in China have blown off the remaining gloss on Do No Evil. From now on, it may be a much harder grind for them, and if the information issues get too hot they could easily end up being regulated into a corner. The last of the articles alludes to the huge trouble and loss of trust even one hacking scandal could cause them.
The sweet thing about the new Honda Borg is that once you've keyed the lock the car will drive itself to your crib. And if the cops intervene, there'll be no one in it to arrest!
I guess this workaround will be quietly blocked at some stage ... until the next workaround emerges. Google are in too deep now, though. Their China venture is a whopping mistake, imho. The company whose business pitch is that we should trust it with the world's information falls at the first hurdle by showing it cannot be trusted with even a part of the world's information if the bribe is large enough.
Some things cannot be fact-checked in any worthwhile way. Their power to move us is precisely that they are an "imaginative re-creation" of something that happened, and by this they show us a greater spiritual or emotional truth than the bald facts baldly stated. On the basis of literal, scientific truth, I'm afraid that any publisher's fact-checker would be duty-bound to reject the US Constitution and demand cuts or rewriting of 90 per cent of the New Testament, including the retitling of the Letters of St Paul to "Letters by an Unknown Author". The miracle of the feeding of the 5000, for example, cannot literally be true, but to its original listeners the story would have contained some very powerful truths.
I'm not sure which is the more nauseating. That the Opera crew (and sundry attorneys and greed-crazed readers) should have failed to notice that "A Million Little Pieces" could not possibly be true in any literal way; or that having had this pointed out to them, they should blame others for their own stupidity then seek to profit from it.
I doubt we'll hear Oprah calling up an archbishop and demanding the withdrawal of the New Testament any time soon. Maybe, shock horror, the world of 2000 years ago had a much more sophisticated understanding of truth and fiction that we do today.
FWIW, I didn't think much of "A Million Little Pieces". It fails to engage. And, yes, publishers are mostly a two-faced, puffed-up crowd, prattling about literature while paying freelance editors and proofreaders not much more than burger-flipping rates then blaming them for foobars that a Harvard professor might easily have missed.
Sorry, but we can't have it both ways. It boils down to the fact that we have all become so self-important that we can't be 'inconvenienced' by waiting to make sure people don't try to kill us.
It might just as easily boil down to the fact that we are too easily scared. A low-level war - which is what the present terrorist threat could be called - would claim a certain number of lives each year if we did only a little to tighten security, but at minimum financial or organizational cost to our way of life. An acceptable price to pay? There is a case for it. A full-scale response - which is what we seem to be falling into - is extremely expensive, extremely disruptive and shafts civil liberties. Oh, and people still get killed anyway. There are arguments on both sides, but voters don't yet seem to have been given much of a chance to express an opinion.
Bear in mind that Gates was speaking at the Davos summit, a cosy club of self-appointed (and probably self-regarding) movers and shakers from around the world. Not a few of these people would trample their grandmother - never mind a few Chinese workers - if they thought there was a buck on the other side of the road. Gates was never going to talk down capitalism, technology or China to an audience like this, no matter which companies are involved.
The one thing all these extremely rich folks seem to take as gospel is that despite the Chinese government backing capitalism and dictorial repression at the same time, China is the future, China is where the money is, China is about to become unimaginably prosperous, etc., etc. Received opinion has said the same before about states that soon after imploded in war, chaos, financial collapse and disaster of one kind or another. For myself, I wouldn't bank on received opinion being right this time either.
Britain is somewhat ahead of the USA in this regard. Because ID checking is legal and accepted at airports, the authorities are keen to introduce it at railway stations, before boarding a train, and on journeys by coach. From there it is only a small step to require some kind of prior notification, so that the police will know who is on a train or coach before it leaves.
I doubt that Gilmore vs Gonzales will look quite so benign if the USA goes down the same route, which it looks like doing. Then, people may find themselves legally obliged to fill out a long form before catching a train or coach to see their folks for the weekend, and wait in a queue for a couple of hours while their luggage is put through a scanner on the platform or roadside.
My reading is that the EU is miffed at the way Microsoft has handled this over the past few days. Microsoft seem to have sent the EU compliance folks the minimum of details while spinning a big press release and publicity bandwagon about what a massive, epoch-making offer they now have on the table. Presumably Microsoft are hoping either to overwhelm the EU via the publicity effect or push the EU into a corner whereby if the EU turn down this "offer" (which is not what Micrsoft were asked to provide) they will look churlish and against the opening up of closed code.
It's all a game. Microsoft don't want to comply if they can avoid it, because they see interoperability as bad for their business. We know that; they know that; and they know we know that. Hence this little charade with thousands of documents and byzantine and no doubt extremely expensive "peak at our code" procedures. Just my 2 cents, but I hope the EU take a tough stance against this attempt to intimidate and manipulate them.
Just my 2 cents, but playing politics isn't going to help Linux, or any other software. There is nothing wrong with looking at ways in which in the GPL2 (or any other licence) could be improved. But buying into the agenda of some of the more far-out ranters and anti-capitalist nutjobs of the free software world isn't going to help anyone, and at the moment they all seem lumped together under the general heading "GPL3" On the contrary, it will make Linux less useful to a lot of folks and put off still more potential users.
Not for the first time, Linux Torvalds is applying a touch to the brakes and suggesting that a little common sense might go a long way. Or that's how I read this, anyway. I guess the ghastly Richard Stallman will just have to continue gnashing and gnuing his teeth. The Linux kernel is absolutely not his kernel.
"How to do what you love" is a rather meretricious title for an essay on work, and in any case life rarely goes according to plan. Who you are is a little more important than what you do, unless you're one of those people whose first and probably only question on social occasions is "What do you do?" This essay omits the other, more significant half of the equation which is "What is the good life?". If I can't make a fair stab at that, chances are slim that a job will save the day. Besides, what someone said about the second question, say, two and a half thousand years ago may be as helpful and inspiring as what the Paul Grahams of this world said yesterday.
Personally, I prefer Steve Jobs' awesome commencement address at Stanford last year. In it, he said "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."
Which neatly shows up the perennial dilemma "truck driver or Nobel scientist - which is more worthwhile?" to be a complete illusion.
From the article: "To put it another way, the entire population of Glasgow could fly to New York and back again and the resulting emissions would still be less than that from devices left in sleep mode."
It's not the entire population of Glasgow flying to New York that worries me. It's the prospect of them coming back again.
Wasting electricity is an expensive pastime, no doubt. But worrying about standby mode is a gnat-bite compared to our hopeless dependence on the motor car and in the UK's case our increasing dependence on importing energy from rather unstable parts of the world. This sounds rather like a typical UK New Labour gambit: encouraging people to feel good citizens while dodging the all the tough questions.
Google doesn't make many mistakes but when it does, boy, are they doozies
I'm not American and I'm not sure I understand. What is a "doozy" and should I be worried if I have one? I'm hoping it isn't the kind of thing I can catch just from using the internet.
So, do you like tweaking or not?
:)
Lol. I'd like it from Scarlett Johansson or even Allison Janney but not alas from your average geek.
This is the perfect example of not understanding "The Debian System". YOU aren't supposed to use unstable. You're not even supposed to use testing. If you don't want to have to fiddle with the system, use "stable". That's what it's for. This is clearly explained in a number of places in the documentation.
Actually, that's the perfect example of why Debian doesn't work for everyone, for stictly my two cents. Not every user is in it to be hectored (an obsession with the Debian way, in full caps) or treated with disdain (must be too stupid to have read any documentation, etc.). Personally, I use Linux to get away from all that stuff about we own your ass so do what we say.
To answer another reply, I now use a mucho tweaked SuSE. Works for me. Any number of other distros, including Debian, may well work better for you, maybe more so now Martin Krafft has given everyone the gift of a full-up guide to Debian.
Kudos to Martin Krafft for writing his book. Many dream but few ever get it together ...
That said, I spent most of 2005 running Debian Unstable and Debian Testing on different systems and ended up finding both overrated and generally a disappointmennt. Debian was too demanding of time and needed seemingly endless fiddling around and careful management. It also took a lot of time to set up, though admittedly that is a one-off when an installation is still fresh. More important, the Debian developer community seemed shot through with an obsession with doing things the Debian way, with college-level debates (aka rows), with considerable disdain for new users and with frankly pretty obscure things of little interest to many in the everyday world. Overall, I began to wonder if some of these guys would recognize an end-user if they fell over one and my faith in the Debian way rapidly dwindled.
None of this should detract from Krafft's achievement, though. It's a heck of a good thing to have done. I do find it a little odd that he should recommend that new users try Ubuntu rather than Debian. One is tempted to ask: what's the problem whereby they can't use Debian, then?
For myself, I've now gone back to another distro. It's pretty nearly as capable as Debian, with the difference that its devs are technical experts who confine themselves to delivering what works. A distro that puts out for its users without striking tiresome poses or co-opting its users into politics of some kind is much the more preferable, for me at least.
Cringely seems in a defensive mood, with rather a dull set of ideas. Predictions are meant to be fun. I don't think it matters whether they are precisely correct. Often, the writer gets the details wrong but the general thrust is entirely accurate. Maybe Cringely should have taken a tip from the ancient Persians and written the piece while blind drunk then rewritten it when sober. Maybe he did, and it's taken until mid-January to get over a monster hang-over.
The general approach seems to be that 2006 will be Apple's year, and maybe Sony's if there is a sudden spurt of interest in the cell processor. Everyone else will bide their time (Google), tread water (Microsoft) or go backwards (IBM and the rest of the world, apparently). Boring. And while everyone seems to be talking about the fabled media center, no one seems to have had a good enough sighting yet to provide a coherent description of what it will be like.
I'd love to have heard Cringely expound a little more on Google's shipping-container data centers he is so fond of mentioning, if they exist. And I guess he could have taken a few bets for us aficionados of the 33-1 outsider, like Sun and Novell both face investor-led crises and end up on Wall Street's M&A slab, and someone makes a grab for ATI.
And, on a small note, imho in 2006 Ubuntu have a great opportunity to consolidate their performance and establish themselves as the desktop of choice for Linux people, behind Red Hat and Novell (or what becomes of it) slugging it out in the corporate arena. Or perhaps that should read Red Hat consolidating it's near-monopoly in the corporate arena. Anyone up for a punt on Megacorp Inc. taking a swing at acquiring them?
My take on this: Google already said they won't make their own PC, because they can work with some great hardware partners.
So Apple will soon announce a tablet, a PDA, and a VOIP phone/iPod, each of which will work with the wireless infrastructure that Google is rolling out.
Yup, that is a very interesting idea. How nice it would be not to have to deal with the incumbent cellphone carriers where I live and for whom the term "daylight robbery" could have been coined.
Other speculation is that the play here isn't for a conventional cellphone. It's for VOIP.
:)
A conventional cellphone means that Apple would have to kowtow to all the carriers and their phone would be just one phone among a plethora of other, well-established outfits (Nokia, Moto, Samsung, whoever).
But a VOIP phone using wifi would enable Apple to sidestep being just another player and control the whole thing all the way down the line. Of course there is the minor problem of establishing a huge wifi network, but maybe this is where Google and friends come in, and anyway didn't someone say this is all wild, wild speculation?
Can't recall where I read this. Mabye yesterday on Slashdot
The original St Lawrence angered the Prefect of Rome who ordered him to be roasted to death on a grid-iron. Although, according to the sources, St Lawrence faced his death with fortitude and even managed a joke with the executioner - quite a feat, as Roman executioners were probably not known their sense of humour.
I hope that if Google ever do manage to construct a machine that passes the Turing test it will manage a joke instead of a sad sqwark as someone reaches for the Off switch.
I don't think the spam problem is declining if you include all forms of unsolicited bulk email. Phishing is a real problem now - ask any bank. In the old phrase, it's not just the quantity it's the quality. Half as much spam that is four times as effective in fooling filters and/or fooling users is not a decline in spam. And would I like young members of my family or my mother to get even one spam a day offering the delights of, say, bestiality? Nope. One spam is too many and no jail is big enough for some of these operators.
I think it's necessary to turn the page with all the graphs on it the other way up. These will show an increase in governmental and IT industry self-satisfaction, cheerleading and (some might say reckless) optimism. I guess they've decided to declare the great spam war won and the problem fading. Except it isn't.
Well the point is they didn't merge (and nor did Apple and IBM), so what else is new.
This sound more like some kind of hopeless, unrequited longing for a beautiful girl. Apple has style and pizzaz and Sun doesn't, but oh how Sun longs for them! The chairman of Sun recently spoke of having an "iPod moment" around something or other, probably a new line of servers or piece of software. It wasn't, but I think we can guess where he was coming from.
So far, malware has been treated as an IT/commercial problem (which is what this article does), but it has become so pervasive and costly that it is also now a political problem. The barely fettered growth of malware - its sheer scale, organization and the amounts of money involved - raises a lot of questions about privacy, international cooperation and what to do about the internet itself. I don't think it's something that the IT industry can tackle on its own. You can have as much protection as you like, but so long as malware outfits can slip through 1001 transnational loopholes and exploit safe-haven jurisdictions there will always be a serious problem.
.ru or .ro can apparently do what they like, and some notorious spammers and phishers remain on Top 50 lists for years without anyone so much as slapping their wrist. In previous centuries, the whole thing was called "piracy" and states tackled it with, erm, "extreme prejudice". Sometimes, I feel they may have been on to something.
I don't pretend to know the answers, but waving a copy of Norton Internet Security at the bad boys isn't it, for sure. Perhaps there is an element of deliberate wimping out going on here. The IT industry doesn't want to admit it cannot solve things alone, because it doesn't want politicians and regulators muscling in. And politicians like to pretend that malware is purely an IT problem because they don't want the headache of involvement in sorting out the mess.
As one result, perhaps, domains ending in letters like
If you look at the totality of what Microsoft does, Gates is surely right. IBM is the 800lb gorilla of services (as distinct from software though IBM is huge in that too). Despite his claims about Microsoft just being a lil' old software house now and in future, my guess is that Gates sees services as the big one in the coming years. Yes, Google can hurt Microsoft a bit on the consumer desktop, and so can Apple and others, but the big money is in enterprise business.
If this is correct, then it follows that Microsoft may well have concluded that their cosy world of pay-for software has peaked and will now start to decline no matter what they do, so they are preparing to reposition themselves. Admittedly the great man's sour tone and strange diction don't help.
Sad to say, but a random selection of the thinkers and scientists quoted here didn't do much for me. Many of the ideas seemed rather dull and occasionally pompous as well. These are not new ideas; they are simply ideas that are already in the air. I can come across them on TV, in an upmarket newspaper or good journal or in a hundred books in my local bookstore.
The trouble is that this is a very, very narrow selection of people. It would be more enlightening, perhaps, to choose a much broader selection of people (not only scientists and academic thinkers) from all over the world. It's rather silly to think that scientists can solve all our problems or even ask all the right questions. Even sillier is the notion that we - our culture - have all the answers and need ask no questions outside it. Whether that is also dangerous I cannot say.
The article misses out on a couple of things, perhaps. Einstein also stands out because he was an intensely moral man who had interesting and brave things to say on the sheer mystery of life. He was a highly gifted communicator who wrote well on a wide range of subjects far beyond his own field.
Even if you don't subscribe to the "myth of genius", men of such rounded accomplishment are very rare. Knowledge has expanded so rapidly that it is hard enough to know your own field, let alone know enough worth saying about other fields. Perhaps Einstein's was the last generation that could span, if not all knowledge, then a substantial part of it. We are all specialists these days.
Besides, we now live in a world in which enterprise and individuality of the Einsteinian kind are less appreciated. Since his heyday, so much has been subordinated to the dismal science of economics, the realm where the beancounter is king and inspiration is seen as a shocking waste of tax dollars or corporate profits. Arguably, the closest equivalent to Einstein today is not a scientist but the Dalai Lama, another gifted communicator who understands that knowledge alone is not enough.