The number forwarding was mentioned not to forward the tracking but so that kids couldn't leave the phone one place and have calls forwarded to another, to make it look like they were staying put. Anyway, I hope you're joking about joking about this being a big brother issue. It's not. It's about parenting, something that needs to be rediscovered these days, and if technology can be used to that end (it's usually used the other way) why not?
You tell 'em, hippie boy. Except--and here's where reality hits your politics in the tiny little balls--how well off would people be in the rest of the world if we didn't "excessively" consume? Sure, the trees would be happy, but the people would be even more starving than they are right now. Do you really care more about the environment than the people in it? Should we pay the workers more? Hard to argue against that. But if we pay them too much nobody will buy, or worse yet, we'll start actually hiring Americans to do it. And then they have no job.
I think the problem here is that there are people in the world, through no fault of their own or mine or yours, who are living in absolute shit. There simply is no way to fix that immediately, and sometime the best you can do still looks pretty bad. Most people can't deal with that reality, but I guess I'm just more progressive than they are.
I think it's the reverse. The claim that there aren't 500 versions is the lie that ignores the reality of different peculiarities in all the distros. It's not just the kernel. It's the all the different combinations this package and that which can be installed. Which X modules you've got, what sound mixer, where and which fonts do you have. You're kidding yourself if you think binary distributions work well on linux.
You know the litany of config items which flash by when you do a./configure on a source distribution? Granted, most of those aren't needed, but exactly where do you think that gets done in a binary distribution? Obviously, it mostly doesn't, which perhaps explains where binary distros are so hard to do.
School is six hours. Kids are wont to spent time with friends after school. Even if you only allow them an hour or two, that's 8 hours they are not in your direct influence. That seems unavoidable to me. I certainly agree with your criticism of the lack of personal accountability. That's especially the case when it comes to kids watching TV and playing video games. But it's naive to think children won't be a function, to some significant extent, of their culture. Unless you want to live on a compound and home school your children into asocial oblivion. The fact that society affects kids is why people generally care so much about it. Otherwise, I wouldn't really give a shit about the general decline of it.
Yeah, I can't fathom why companies even bother with a linux version of anything. It's got 1/20th the market share and 20 times the pain. The Mac may have a small market share, too, but at least it's not divided among a million different distros. Just today alone I've had trouble dealing with Opera (installation script and permission problems), Rhapsody (just never worked), Firefox (hangs during loads) and now Earth. About once a week I shutdown linux during a swarm of swearing and vow to never boot from that bloody partition again. The only reason I ever do is to program. As always, that's the one place that linux shines due to its unix roots and first class support for the gnu tool chain. Other than that, though, fudge it.
One would think Google porting earth to our beloved linux would enhance the image of the platform. Having played with it, however, my guess is that it will simply serve as a perfect example of why linux is such a miserable pain in the ass. First, there's the font availability issue. Then there's the graphics card support (mine didn't work properly despite using a supported card for RHEL). When an app barely works under RHEL, then I'd say there's going to be a lot of problems. I just don't honestly see how one can distribute an app as complex as Earth on linux, let alone hope to support it, when there's absolutely no standardization on installations out there. That, in the end, is why linux will never make much of itself beyond the geek niche: there are, in essence, about 500 versions of linux out there to write to and support. If I were Google I'd say screw this in quick order, and I'm guessing that this linux version will be orphaned. They'll fix this one the best they can and then leave it in the dust while the Mac OS X and PC versions are updated.
Now, before the birkenstock idealogue choir chimes in with all the goddam web sites I'm supposed to visit to figure out how to get this thing working under linux, let me just say this: Fuck that; I'm booting up my Mac and playing with the new Earth there. Life is too short for me to dick around trying to cajole yet another linux app into working with my particular kernel and my particular font installation, etc, etc, etc... And you can call me all the names you want, but the fact of the matter is that I'm on the high end of patience and ability with computers (relative to the average guy, though probably not here) and I just don't give a shit enough to spend another second trying to get the linux version of Earth working or figure out the correct way to install it on my system. My point is simply that if a guy getting a PhD in EECS feels this way, you can bet the vast majority of the computer users in the world do, too.
Hmm. I guess I'm confused. I thought that for a while Yahoo search was #1 before Google became #1. I knew Yahoo actually went through Inktomi (or however it's spelled) but I thought they were still the most popular for awhile. Am I wrong about that? My memory of that time is: Lycos->AltaVista->Yahoo (inktomi)->Google. Man, those were the days. I remember thinking AltaVista was the absolute shit when they let people do Boolean searches. I still miss the NEAR tag from Altavista. It was very useful.
It's actually kind of sad to go through the litany of dead or dying from the early days. I found my old links list from 1992-1996 (college years) the other day. Shed a tear (almost) for GSN, SiliconInvestor, the old NCSA Netscape page, NetMarket (the first), The Whole Internet User's Guide, UMich Gopher (!), Zen and the Art of the Internet, fsp, archive.wustl.edu... So much fun back then.
Yeah, I should've addressed that in my first post. I think it's fair to assume that the cell phone will work the vast majority of the time. You wouldn't even try this if you lived in an area where the cell phone is spotty. Dropping out here and there is actually not a problem for the tracking service. Your kid's not going to warp from the library to a crack house in five minutes. As you suggest, though, I agree this won't work in an area where Verizon coverage isn't good, but I really think it's a solid idea otherwise. If the kid pulls out the battery, you'll know in a few minutes and his punk ass will be grass. And the broken phone things works once--ONCE--if the kid ever wants to see daylight before college. Man, I'm going to be a great Dad...
Nobody is saying the areas they are entering aren't potentially lucrative. We're just suggesting that Google won't be able to do them well enough to make it so, and may sacrifice the areas in which they currently are the best. I, for one, think it's a mistake to act as if the web is everything. People seem to love saying "the ____ is the new ____" and one of the most popular items for the first ___ is the web. Well, I for one am not going to give up Apple Mail for gmail any time soon. I kind of like my computer, and it does a better job at interfacing from three feet than Google will ever be able to do from 3000 miles. Sure, some things are better done 3000 miles away, like building a database of the entire internet. But I just don't think I need my little spreadsheet over in Mountain View, CA. Even if I'm collaborating, I'd rather do it over a LAN or maybe WAN peer to peer. Web apps mystify me, but maybe I'm just a curmudgeon...
i wish there were more parents like you! i think you're right that a lot of the problem is parents who are too willing to treat their children as equals and who try to negotiate when dictating is neccesary. drives me bat shit when i see some sappy new age parents trying to reason with their screaming kids in the store when they really just need to lay down the law.
If Verizon's service is tracking the user, I'm sure it's also informing about the connection. I would imagine if the phone goes out of range, it tells the parent.
But you may have a point about parents themselves, though I think you're underestimating the effect of society and peer groups on kids. I know some great people with, frankly, really shitty kids. I can only assume it's the fact that their kids unavoidably spend more time around their fellow punks (at school and after) than their parents. Plus, never underestimate the power of media to completely screw up kids' value systems. A couple good parents can't really compete with Madison Avenue in terms of persuasion. Even mainstream television, let alone commercials, display incredibly low moral standards. It occurred to me one day that virtually every episode of "Friends" (which I loved) involved them grossly decieving and conniving their close friends. But this is about to lead into one of my rants about how we're declining as a civilization, and I hardly think you want to hear that...:-)
I don't think Wright airplanes were ever successful, despite being the first airplanes purchased by the Army. Second, I believe you're talking about Curtiss-Wright engines, which had nothing to do with the Wright brothers, but which resulted from the purchase of the failed Wright Aeronautics early on. I think they only kept the Wright name because of the name. The Wrights were failed as engine manufacturers, which is why it was Curtiss-Wright, and not Wright or just Wright-Curtiss. In fact, as far as I can tell, some people aren't even sure if the Wrights should be considered the first to have invented powered flight since their first planes seemed to need ramps or catapults, and some think they never made it out of ground effect. It may be that history regards Google with the same kind of begruding admiration: they were one of the first to the table, and one of the first to leave, only to be remembered as a name.
I'm not bashing Google. I hope they succeed. If they don't, the only American company with a shot is Microsoft, and I don't want that. IT is just starting to recover from the dark ages under which Microsoft's tyrannical incompetence held it. I'm simply pointing out that Google may be headed for a fall at this rate. I hope I'm wrong!
I'm sure the people at Verizon have thought about this a little longer than you give them credit for. For one, the parents will be able to call the cell phone when they want, and bust the kid if he's not there. Any sufficiently clever parent will call at least once to check up on the kid, or establish a precedent of making it likely. Second, Verizon can alert parents when the number is forwarded, or disable forwarding of the number. There's really no way around that without unbelievably serious hacking. And if my kid could do that, then I'd be happy to let him go to where ever the hell he wants to go!
I can't really argue with you about that, but wouldn't you rather impact history AND be around for the future? There's no reason they are mutually exclusive. It's just that history seems to find them rare. My guess is that first mover success is often correlated with traits that don't make for continued success. For example, one reason Google beat other people to search prominence is that they were willing to go public with something "good enough". There were a lot of people who were smarter, working on better stuff, who just didn't come out in time. I mean, let's be honest: PageRank is not exactly the most brilliant CS concept ever. It's actually pretty lowbrow. But it works pretty well, and they had the balls to sell it while others were out messing with more farsighted search tech. But first mover has a huge advantage and Google's strategy was the right one. But the same boldness and arrogance that causes two guys to leave their PhDs to start a company around a simple, easily copied idea are the same traits that cause them to think they can do everything, and it could potentially be their undoing.
Doesn't anybody remember how quickly Google came on the scene and supplanted Yahoo search? Doesn't anybody think Google can itself be Googled by somebody else?
well, let's be honest here: technically they haven't actually released gmail or maps.:-) but your point is taken; those are great apps. but google talk is NOT to gaim what google search is to msn search. in other words, i can live without google talk, but i'd be up a creek without google search. however, if they keep diverting their smart people towards google *blank*, then it may just be a matter of time before i can live without google search. they were first, and like the wrights they'll be the only ones flying for a while. but pretty soon a boeing will come along who figures out how to do it even better. in fact, it's a pretty good analogy. the Wrights were bold and came out first, but to be honest they weren't very knowledgable about aerodynamics and didn't really know what they were doing. other people who spent the time to really learn aero came along and fairly quickly beat the pants off them while the Wrights were out showboating their first planes, complacent to just coast off their initial glory.
i hope that's not google's fate, but to my eye they do seem to be headed for disaster. they have the arrogance of microsoft without the sticky monopoly to back it.
What about when Sears created the Discover card (which is now its own company and Sears' future looks gloomy) or when the Wright brothers built a flying machine in their bicycle shop. It's a fundamental of business -- change is fact: you can either be part of it or watch it happen. Google is simply applying their resources to expand the productivity they offer the average user. I like it.
Do you know how many airplanes the Wrights SOLD? Do you see any of their bikes still being made? And you said yourself Sears is going down. Perhaps they would've done better to focus on their core business. Change IS good, but so is recognizing your limitations and core competency. People aren't arguing Google can't do this ok, they are just wondering if its a good idea to divert resources towards spreadsheets, of all things.
Once again you mistake pointing out a universal possibility for an intelligent argument. You simply made the meaningless observation (and then repeated it in different three different ways in subsequent posts) that "people are capable of incorrect knowledge". What I was pointing out was that you didn't bother to actually argue why that might be the case here. Obviously, human beings are going to have to be the ones to decide what the good universities are, and of course the determination will be potentially wrong and certainly flawed to some degree. But what else can we do? To take a page from your short book of argument, opinions can only be held by humans. And which humans do you think are be better suited to the task of deciding which universities are good than university professors? You might argue that American professors will be biased, and that a better survey would include a random sampling of professors everywhere. One could make a lot of substantive arguments against the survey. But you didn't.
Good to know you laughed. That's a very relevent, intelligent point of debate. And following up with a nice sounding, but completely meaningless tautology was at least consistent. You do realize that the bullshit about "the limits of your own knowledge..." could apply to ANY argument ever made by a human, including yours, right? You must be a sociology major or a lawyer...
Insightful? Bullshit. More like trite rhetoric. American professors (or profs anywhere) certainly can't be accused of being badly educated. If you haven't heard of a university, it's likely that it's because little research has come out of it of note. Nobody memorizes university names just for the sake of it, you know. Are you suggesting a mark of a good education is being able to recite obscure university names? Well, congrats on the mod up for a thought barely worth thinking, let alone printing...
Meanwhile, people make jokes about how education is now America's major export industry. Funny how a country can make and export something that they don't like to use at home.
Actually, the fact that we don't respect it makes it possible to export it. In fact, if there weren't affirmative action for Americans, our top schools would be almost entirely composed of foreigners. (This isn't purely a dig against American education, because a lot of this is simply due to the fact that Americans are a small minority of the world population.)
Ah! I see why I'm confused. Somewhere I read about the intel macs draining more power during sleep, and I thought the writer was referring to draining more power relative to PCs, not relative to the old PPC macs, which is what he must've meant. I'm glad to be corrected.
I think you'd be surprised at how much energy macs use when "sleeping". I don't remember the numbers, but my understanding is that the sleep mode on Macs is a bit of a fake. It shuts stuff down like the screen and spins down the drive and steps down the proc speed, but otherwise it's actually pretty much fully running. I think when PCs sleep the processor really does shut down and the memory is kept refreshed using a minimal amount of energy.
Slashdot Mirror
Linux users have Linus Torvalds hold their dicks and Richard Stallman ends up covered in piss.
Awful picky for a guy reading Slashdot...
The number forwarding was mentioned not to forward the tracking but so that kids couldn't leave the phone one place and have calls forwarded to another, to make it look like they were staying put. Anyway, I hope you're joking about joking about this being a big brother issue. It's not. It's about parenting, something that needs to be rediscovered these days, and if technology can be used to that end (it's usually used the other way) why not?
I think the problem here is that there are people in the world, through no fault of their own or mine or yours, who are living in absolute shit. There simply is no way to fix that immediately, and sometime the best you can do still looks pretty bad. Most people can't deal with that reality, but I guess I'm just more progressive than they are.
They pretty much were for the Mac!
You know the litany of config items which flash by when you do a ./configure on a source distribution? Granted, most of those aren't needed, but exactly where do you think that gets done in a binary distribution? Obviously, it mostly doesn't, which perhaps explains where binary distros are so hard to do.
School is six hours. Kids are wont to spent time with friends after school. Even if you only allow them an hour or two, that's 8 hours they are not in your direct influence. That seems unavoidable to me. I certainly agree with your criticism of the lack of personal accountability. That's especially the case when it comes to kids watching TV and playing video games. But it's naive to think children won't be a function, to some significant extent, of their culture. Unless you want to live on a compound and home school your children into asocial oblivion. The fact that society affects kids is why people generally care so much about it. Otherwise, I wouldn't really give a shit about the general decline of it.
Yeah, I can't fathom why companies even bother with a linux version of anything. It's got 1/20th the market share and 20 times the pain. The Mac may have a small market share, too, but at least it's not divided among a million different distros. Just today alone I've had trouble dealing with Opera (installation script and permission problems), Rhapsody (just never worked), Firefox (hangs during loads) and now Earth. About once a week I shutdown linux during a swarm of swearing and vow to never boot from that bloody partition again. The only reason I ever do is to program. As always, that's the one place that linux shines due to its unix roots and first class support for the gnu tool chain. Other than that, though, fudge it.
Now, before the birkenstock idealogue choir chimes in with all the goddam web sites I'm supposed to visit to figure out how to get this thing working under linux, let me just say this: Fuck that; I'm booting up my Mac and playing with the new Earth there. Life is too short for me to dick around trying to cajole yet another linux app into working with my particular kernel and my particular font installation, etc, etc, etc... And you can call me all the names you want, but the fact of the matter is that I'm on the high end of patience and ability with computers (relative to the average guy, though probably not here) and I just don't give a shit enough to spend another second trying to get the linux version of Earth working or figure out the correct way to install it on my system. My point is simply that if a guy getting a PhD in EECS feels this way, you can bet the vast majority of the computer users in the world do, too.
It's actually kind of sad to go through the litany of dead or dying from the early days. I found my old links list from 1992-1996 (college years) the other day. Shed a tear (almost) for GSN, SiliconInvestor, the old NCSA Netscape page, NetMarket (the first), The Whole Internet User's Guide, UMich Gopher (!), Zen and the Art of the Internet, fsp, archive.wustl.edu... So much fun back then.
Yeah, I should've addressed that in my first post. I think it's fair to assume that the cell phone will work the vast majority of the time. You wouldn't even try this if you lived in an area where the cell phone is spotty. Dropping out here and there is actually not a problem for the tracking service. Your kid's not going to warp from the library to a crack house in five minutes. As you suggest, though, I agree this won't work in an area where Verizon coverage isn't good, but I really think it's a solid idea otherwise. If the kid pulls out the battery, you'll know in a few minutes and his punk ass will be grass. And the broken phone things works once--ONCE--if the kid ever wants to see daylight before college. Man, I'm going to be a great Dad...
Nobody is saying the areas they are entering aren't potentially lucrative. We're just suggesting that Google won't be able to do them well enough to make it so, and may sacrifice the areas in which they currently are the best. I, for one, think it's a mistake to act as if the web is everything. People seem to love saying "the ____ is the new ____" and one of the most popular items for the first ___ is the web. Well, I for one am not going to give up Apple Mail for gmail any time soon. I kind of like my computer, and it does a better job at interfacing from three feet than Google will ever be able to do from 3000 miles. Sure, some things are better done 3000 miles away, like building a database of the entire internet. But I just don't think I need my little spreadsheet over in Mountain View, CA. Even if I'm collaborating, I'd rather do it over a LAN or maybe WAN peer to peer. Web apps mystify me, but maybe I'm just a curmudgeon...
i wish there were more parents like you! i think you're right that a lot of the problem is parents who are too willing to treat their children as equals and who try to negotiate when dictating is neccesary. drives me bat shit when i see some sappy new age parents trying to reason with their screaming kids in the store when they really just need to lay down the law.
But you may have a point about parents themselves, though I think you're underestimating the effect of society and peer groups on kids. I know some great people with, frankly, really shitty kids. I can only assume it's the fact that their kids unavoidably spend more time around their fellow punks (at school and after) than their parents. Plus, never underestimate the power of media to completely screw up kids' value systems. A couple good parents can't really compete with Madison Avenue in terms of persuasion. Even mainstream television, let alone commercials, display incredibly low moral standards. It occurred to me one day that virtually every episode of "Friends" (which I loved) involved them grossly decieving and conniving their close friends. But this is about to lead into one of my rants about how we're declining as a civilization, and I hardly think you want to hear that... :-)
I'm not bashing Google. I hope they succeed. If they don't, the only American company with a shot is Microsoft, and I don't want that. IT is just starting to recover from the dark ages under which Microsoft's tyrannical incompetence held it. I'm simply pointing out that Google may be headed for a fall at this rate. I hope I'm wrong!
I'm sure the people at Verizon have thought about this a little longer than you give them credit for. For one, the parents will be able to call the cell phone when they want, and bust the kid if he's not there. Any sufficiently clever parent will call at least once to check up on the kid, or establish a precedent of making it likely. Second, Verizon can alert parents when the number is forwarded, or disable forwarding of the number. There's really no way around that without unbelievably serious hacking. And if my kid could do that, then I'd be happy to let him go to where ever the hell he wants to go!
Doesn't anybody remember how quickly Google came on the scene and supplanted Yahoo search? Doesn't anybody think Google can itself be Googled by somebody else?
i hope that's not google's fate, but to my eye they do seem to be headed for disaster. they have the arrogance of microsoft without the sticky monopoly to back it.
Do you know how many airplanes the Wrights SOLD? Do you see any of their bikes still being made? And you said yourself Sears is going down. Perhaps they would've done better to focus on their core business. Change IS good, but so is recognizing your limitations and core competency. People aren't arguing Google can't do this ok, they are just wondering if its a good idea to divert resources towards spreadsheets, of all things.
Once again you mistake pointing out a universal possibility for an intelligent argument. You simply made the meaningless observation (and then repeated it in different three different ways in subsequent posts) that "people are capable of incorrect knowledge". What I was pointing out was that you didn't bother to actually argue why that might be the case here. Obviously, human beings are going to have to be the ones to decide what the good universities are, and of course the determination will be potentially wrong and certainly flawed to some degree. But what else can we do? To take a page from your short book of argument, opinions can only be held by humans. And which humans do you think are be better suited to the task of deciding which universities are good than university professors? You might argue that American professors will be biased, and that a better survey would include a random sampling of professors everywhere. One could make a lot of substantive arguments against the survey. But you didn't.
Good to know you laughed. That's a very relevent, intelligent point of debate. And following up with a nice sounding, but completely meaningless tautology was at least consistent. You do realize that the bullshit about "the limits of your own knowledge..." could apply to ANY argument ever made by a human, including yours, right? You must be a sociology major or a lawyer...
Insightful? Bullshit. More like trite rhetoric. American professors (or profs anywhere) certainly can't be accused of being badly educated. If you haven't heard of a university, it's likely that it's because little research has come out of it of note. Nobody memorizes university names just for the sake of it, you know. Are you suggesting a mark of a good education is being able to recite obscure university names? Well, congrats on the mod up for a thought barely worth thinking, let alone printing...
Actually, the fact that we don't respect it makes it possible to export it. In fact, if there weren't affirmative action for Americans, our top schools would be almost entirely composed of foreigners. (This isn't purely a dig against American education, because a lot of this is simply due to the fact that Americans are a small minority of the world population.)
Ah! I see why I'm confused. Somewhere I read about the intel macs draining more power during sleep, and I thought the writer was referring to draining more power relative to PCs, not relative to the old PPC macs, which is what he must've meant. I'm glad to be corrected.
Can anybody else verify or refute this?