AT&T killed google voice because the "Killer App" that the iPhone has (visual voicemail) is completely, totally, and utterly DESTROYED by it.
If you haven't used google voice, let me explain. Somebody leaves you a voicemail on your GV number. Google does voice recognition on it, and sends you an email of the text. In the email is a little widget that allows you to play the audio.
Apparently, the visual voice mail was a HUGELY expensive undertaking for AT&T. Having somebody offer *the* reason to get an iPhone for *free* is really, really scary to them.
Google offered a superior product for infinitely (as in divide by zero) cheaper. AT&T shat their pants, and blocked it.
1: Find a planet full of potentially exploitable resources that can possibly support life 2: Seed it with basic life 3: Wait for the life to evolve 4: Oh, yep, it can support life 5: Move in 6: Profit.
One of the silliest things that humans seem to get stuck in their heads is that other creatures would have the same sort of life expectancy as we do. Animals on our own planet have drastically varying lifespans and we all evolved from the same goop.
Start thinking about having a lifespan in the hundreds of millions of years (or no lifespan at all...something like...oh, I don't know, a machine/biological hyrbid intelligence) and suddenly those lightyears which seem SOOOOOOOO FAR are not so far any more.
I know that I personally *HATE* it when a company can offer me a service that I really want.
Something like this really pisses me off, though, because netflix is coming into my house and forcing me to watch their "ads"...err..I mean "suggestions". I mean, it isn't like I signed up for the service and pay them a monthly fee exactly because they have a huge library of movies to me! The worst part is that they charge me every time I rent another movie! A move like this is just an attempt to get me to rent more!
Wait...wut?
Oh, yeah, this sort of "the world is ENDING" "corporations are t3h EVILZ!" fearmongering is some of the most refined bullshiat available for consumption on the internets. How could you even possibly look at this as something bad? They're offering a whole ton of money to some geeks to do what the geeks love doing: tinkering with computer machines.
The scary part is that a I genuinely believe that the "geeks" building systems like this don't *know* any better.
There was a kid that I once took a class with. He was...possibly the most incompetent person I have ever met in my entire life. He once (this is not a joke) bought a whole bunch of harddisks off of new egg (like...thousands of dollars worth of them), with the full intent of "downloading the entire internet".
Now, I understand that people can do stupid things, make mistakes, be ill-informed, new, etc, but the problem with this guy is that he didn't understand that he didn't understand. Does that make sense (sorry that it sounds sortof like a consultanty buzzword).
Another problem was that he was OVERLY confident in EVERYTHING that he did. This confidence absolutely leads to jobs. If a PHB type walks up to two geeks and says something like "We can't afford anything more than a T1, but we need to be able to stream a live HD video stream to a couple of hundred people next week", one geek is going to look at him, possible laugh a bit and say something to the effect of "Well...that is...not going to happen. If you want to do something like that, we're going to need a bit more than a T1, we're also going to need to get a contract going with a CDN, and I'm going to need time to test everything. It is unlikely that this will be able to happen in the next few days, but I will try". The other, totally incompetent, geek is going to look at him and say "Yeah, you can TOTALLY do that! I can stream HD youtube videos all day long on our T1 and youtube has MILLIONS of customers. It will totally work. We should use bittorrent for it."
Which geek do you think is going to get hired?
It isn't that these people are snickering because they're pulling a fast one and collecting a fat paycheck, they're doing this because, in all likelihood, they simply don't know any better.
Not to be morbid, but hackers are considerably more expensive than grunts. They likely would be treated the same as pilots are; they're too costly to not be utilized, and are a pain to replace.
Aside from that, if you're working as a civilian contractor, they can't just reassign you at will.
Now what sort of hacker is going to enlist in the military?
You might not be very familiar with hacker culture. Most hackers, myself included, would pay for the privilege of being able to toy with the sort of computing systems that the military has...
Echelon? That is a real, live, working system. Any hacker out there that DOESN'T start salivating at the mere thought of an opportunity to play with that can turn in their membership card at the door.
If you're not using this, or something like it, then your Admin isn't doing their job.
It looks like none of the users are getting flash until thursday. Sorry guys, no pandora for you. (also looks like I won't be getting a cake on sysadmin day).
You are completely and totally missing the point here.
NOT everybody uses facebook (or as I said in the part of my post that you apparently skipped, any other social network that will rise in the next 30 years). This idea that having "dirt" on everybody nullifies its value because the value of it is uniform for everyone is absurd...beyond absurd.
Marijuana. A LOT of people us it. Does this mean that if Obama was caught smoking it that the news media wouldn't be ALL OVER him for it?
Okay, okay...that is extreme. Alcohol. EVERYBODY drank it in college (or nearly everybody)...and almost all of those people drank it to excess.
If we had pictures of Obama drinking a beer bong, or doing body shots off of some girl, that Rush Limbaugh wouldn't shit his pants in excitement?
[quote]My generation isn't stupid. They know what they're doing -- they're creating a transparent society where we can all be a bit more polite to one another because everyone has dirt on everyone else[/quote]
No.
Your (mine too) generatrion isn't STUPID, they're ignorant. They literally do not understand that when they upload their photos to their "private" profile, there is nothing to prevent me, or you, or anybody else from writing a perl scrip that walks through all of my "friends" downloading all of their photos, and saving them to my computer for some sort of future use.
Getting dirt on everybody so that there is dirt on *nobody*? Lets over-look how stupid this is for a second, and pretend just for the sake of argument that that is even possible. Not everybody uses facebook. So there is not dirt on *everybody*. What happens when the fox news of 30 years from now is looking up dirt on whatever person is running for president at that time? Do you think they're going to ignore the photos that that guy or girl's friends posted of them doing a beer bong at a party 30 years ago that they didn't know about?
The people who chose NOT to ues facebook, or whatever social network will pop up in the next couple of years to replace it, are going to have a considerable advantage over those who used it.
No. They're going to absolutely and completely rip them to shreds. Look at how some web forums like 4chan have used the leverage that they can gain from places like facebook to blackmail people into doing what they want? This IS only going to get worse.
The ubiquity of cameras is, and should be, frightening. Any "advice" to the contrary should be taken as borderline malicious.
If your blog happens to be a well respected, hugely successful news organization in a well respected, modern country, then yes, you will probably get slashdotted.
Uhhmm...Your analogy isn't really "analogous" to the situation.
If you came and parked your car in my front yard, am I at fault if I figure out how to drive it, and do so? Dish network is pumping signal into everybody's house, it isn't as if these people are breaking into their building or something.
I agree that they should be punished, what they were attempting to do was wrong, I just don't think that your analogy holds together.
Not to be a dick, but JFK left office (forcefully, because he was dead) in 1963.
tip: this was 46 years ago, meaning not relevant for deciding how liberal or conservative an individual is.
If the people claiming Obama is liberal prefaced it by saying "Relative to JFK, Obama is a liberal", then let the bashing begin, because, you're right, they would be making asses out of themselves.
The term "liberal" or "conservative" is relative to what is considered normal for the country. Centerists are right down the middle, liberals are to the left, conservatives are to the right.
Relative to Stalin, yeah, Obama is a hard-line conservative; relative to what is considered normal for American politics, he is an ultra liberal in favor of major social programs OR! wait for it.....a socialist.
You can google my username if you want, though. I've been active on this board, fark, reddit, HN, etc. for like...8 years.
I'll troll fark though, thanks:) (i think that me @...heap.com is probably getting slammed with emails right now, in fact, they're probably spamming the shit out of him).
Google seems to be really great at taking a little tiny thing, doing it a couple billion times, and making a few cents off of every transaction.
My guess is that this is aimed more at individuals who are writing blogs and contact managers, not so much corporations with huge development teams and datacenters.
To answer your question: people that don't really think that their data is "top secret".
I'll admit that I might have sent a drunken message or to to them at about 2:00am when the service cut out. They laughed, kept the joke going, and fixed it.
Very much not like usual CSRs that hate their life.
Slashdot Mirror
Google does not have a history of improving products and it is unlikely that this will ban an exception to that.
AT&T killed google voice because the "Killer App" that the iPhone has (visual voicemail) is completely, totally, and utterly DESTROYED by it.
If you haven't used google voice, let me explain. Somebody leaves you a voicemail on your GV number. Google does voice recognition on it, and sends you an email of the text. In the email is a little widget that allows you to play the audio.
Apparently, the visual voice mail was a HUGELY expensive undertaking for AT&T. Having somebody offer *the* reason to get an iPhone for *free* is really, really scary to them.
Google offered a superior product for infinitely (as in divide by zero) cheaper. AT&T shat their pants, and blocked it.
You could even write a blog about it and *MAKE* money.
And by "write a blog" I, of course, mean type it out on a typewritter and mail it to somebody to have them scan it.
Unless they kill each other as a form of population control.
Or much more likely:
1: Find a planet full of potentially exploitable resources that can possibly support life
2: Seed it with basic life
3: Wait for the life to evolve
4: Oh, yep, it can support life
5: Move in
6: Profit.
One of the silliest things that humans seem to get stuck in their heads is that other creatures would have the same sort of life expectancy as we do. Animals on our own planet have drastically varying lifespans and we all evolved from the same goop.
Start thinking about having a lifespan in the hundreds of millions of years (or no lifespan at all...something like...oh, I don't know, a machine/biological hyrbid intelligence) and suddenly those lightyears which seem SOOOOOOOO FAR are not so far any more.
Your windows is not connected to a bunch of servos and motors that allow it to move around.
I know that I personally *HATE* it when a company can offer me a service that I really want.
Something like this really pisses me off, though, because netflix is coming into my house and forcing me to watch their "ads"...err..I mean "suggestions".
I mean, it isn't like I signed up for the service and pay them a monthly fee exactly because they have a huge library of movies to me! The worst part is that they charge me every time I rent another movie! A move like this is just an attempt to get me to rent more!
Wait...wut?
Oh, yeah, this sort of "the world is ENDING" "corporations are t3h EVILZ!" fearmongering is some of the most refined bullshiat available for consumption on the internets.
How could you even possibly look at this as something bad? They're offering a whole ton of money to some geeks to do what the geeks love doing: tinkering with computer machines.
Why do tens or possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of work just for the chance that you might get payed? It seems absurd.
Perhaps you have become lost on these internets.
I suggest trying this website.
or perhaps this one.
You will likely find them much more aligned with your interests than slashdot.
The scary part is that a I genuinely believe that the "geeks" building systems like this don't *know* any better.
There was a kid that I once took a class with. He was...possibly the most incompetent person I have ever met in my entire life. He once (this is not a joke) bought a whole bunch of harddisks off of new egg (like...thousands of dollars worth of them), with the full intent of "downloading the entire internet".
Now, I understand that people can do stupid things, make mistakes, be ill-informed, new, etc, but the problem with this guy is that he didn't understand that he didn't understand. Does that make sense (sorry that it sounds sortof like a consultanty buzzword).
Another problem was that he was OVERLY confident in EVERYTHING that he did. This confidence absolutely leads to jobs. If a PHB type walks up to two geeks and says something like "We can't afford anything more than a T1, but we need to be able to stream a live HD video stream to a couple of hundred people next week", one geek is going to look at him, possible laugh a bit and say something to the effect of "Well...that is...not going to happen. If you want to do something like that, we're going to need a bit more than a T1, we're also going to need to get a contract going with a CDN, and I'm going to need time to test everything. It is unlikely that this will be able to happen in the next few days, but I will try". The other, totally incompetent, geek is going to look at him and say "Yeah, you can TOTALLY do that! I can stream HD youtube videos all day long on our T1 and youtube has MILLIONS of customers. It will totally work. We should use bittorrent for it."
Which geek do you think is going to get hired?
It isn't that these people are snickering because they're pulling a fast one and collecting a fat paycheck, they're doing this because, in all likelihood, they simply don't know any better.
Not to be morbid, but hackers are considerably more expensive than grunts. They likely would be treated the same as pilots are; they're too costly to not be utilized, and are a pain to replace.
Aside from that, if you're working as a civilian contractor, they can't just reassign you at will.
Now what sort of hacker is going to enlist in the military?
You might not be very familiar with hacker culture. Most hackers, myself included, would pay for the privilege of being able to toy with the sort of computing systems that the military has...
Echelon? That is a real, live, working system. Any hacker out there that DOESN'T start salivating at the mere thought of an opportunity to play with that can turn in their membership card at the door.
If you're not using this, or something like it, then your Admin isn't doing their job.
It looks like none of the users are getting flash until thursday. Sorry guys, no pandora for you. (also looks like I won't be getting a cake on sysadmin day).
You are completely and totally missing the point here.
NOT everybody uses facebook (or as I said in the part of my post that you apparently skipped, any other social network that will rise in the next 30 years). This idea that having "dirt" on everybody nullifies its value because the value of it is uniform for everyone is absurd...beyond absurd.
Marijuana. A LOT of people us it. Does this mean that if Obama was caught smoking it that the news media wouldn't be ALL OVER him for it?
Okay, okay...that is extreme. Alcohol. EVERYBODY drank it in college (or nearly everybody)...and almost all of those people drank it to excess.
If we had pictures of Obama drinking a beer bong, or doing body shots off of some girl, that Rush Limbaugh wouldn't shit his pants in excitement?
[quote]My generation isn't stupid. They know what they're doing -- they're creating a transparent society where we can all be a bit more polite to one another because everyone has dirt on everyone else[/quote]
No.
Your (mine too) generatrion isn't STUPID, they're ignorant. They literally do not understand that when they upload their photos to their "private" profile, there is nothing to prevent me, or you, or anybody else from writing a perl scrip that walks through all of my "friends" downloading all of their photos, and saving them to my computer for some sort of future use.
Getting dirt on everybody so that there is dirt on *nobody*? Lets over-look how stupid this is for a second, and pretend just for the sake of argument that that is even possible. Not everybody uses facebook. So there is not dirt on *everybody*. What happens when the fox news of 30 years from now is looking up dirt on whatever person is running for president at that time? Do you think they're going to ignore the photos that that guy or girl's friends posted of them doing a beer bong at a party 30 years ago that they didn't know about?
The people who chose NOT to ues facebook, or whatever social network will pop up in the next couple of years to replace it, are going to have a considerable advantage over those who used it.
No. They're going to absolutely and completely rip them to shreds. Look at how some web forums like 4chan have used the leverage that they can gain from places like facebook to blackmail people into doing what they want? This IS only going to get worse.
The ubiquity of cameras is, and should be, frightening. Any "advice" to the contrary should be taken as borderline malicious.
If your blog happens to be a well respected, hugely successful news organization in a well respected, modern country, then yes, you will probably get slashdotted.
Uhhmm...Your analogy isn't really "analogous" to the situation.
If you came and parked your car in my front yard, am I at fault if I figure out how to drive it, and do so? Dish network is pumping signal into everybody's house, it isn't as if these people are breaking into their building or something.
I agree that they should be punished, what they were attempting to do was wrong, I just don't think that your analogy holds together.
Even better, wtf is this?
fail
goddamnit slashdot, stop changing the fucking website! It works! It is popular! It is not broken!!!!
Not to be a dick, but JFK left office (forcefully, because he was dead) in 1963.
tip: this was 46 years ago, meaning not relevant for deciding how liberal or conservative an individual is.
If the people claiming Obama is liberal prefaced it by saying "Relative to JFK, Obama is a liberal", then let the bashing begin, because, you're right, they would be making asses out of themselves.
This is not what they're saying.
This ridiculous argument makes my blood boil.
The term "liberal" or "conservative" is relative to what is considered normal for the country. Centerists are right down the middle, liberals are to the left, conservatives are to the right.
Relative to Stalin, yeah, Obama is a hard-line conservative; relative to what is considered normal for American politics, he is an ultra liberal in favor of major social programs OR! wait for it.....a socialist.
that email address is getting flooded. join #irantech on freenode and ask for the current one.
Austin is on there right now.
You make a good point.
You can google my username if you want, though. I've been active on this board, fark, reddit, HN, etc. for like...8 years.
I'll troll fark though, thanks :) (i think that me @...heap.com is probably getting slammed with emails right now, in fact, they're probably spamming the shit out of him).
BTW, Iranians still need proxies for their twitter updates. If you have the ability...
I brought a couple of them up, but can't get in contact with anybody to distribute them, who do I need to tell?
Or if they're, oh, I don't know, the ONES GENERATING THE KEYS FOR YOU.
For frak's sake, slashdot, you guys are slipping.
The only way to be sure is to build your own processor out of wood, and only send emails to yourself.
Google seems to be really great at taking a little tiny thing, doing it a couple billion times, and making a few cents off of every transaction.
My guess is that this is aimed more at individuals who are writing blogs and contact managers, not so much corporations with huge development teams and datacenters.
To answer your question: people that don't really think that their data is "top secret".
Yeah, their customer service is fantastic.
I'll admit that I might have sent a drunken message or to to them at about 2:00am when the service cut out. They laughed, kept the joke going, and fixed it.
Very much not like usual CSRs that hate their life.