You stole my scoop!
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| sbergman27 Jan 02, 2005 9:40 AM EDT |
Paul, I had thought that I was the only one to whom Larry had confided. Obviously not. I had decided to wait for Larry's official announcement. It seemed the right and courteous thing to do. Obviously, you do not believe in allowing considerations of common decency to interfere with your capitalization on an early "scoop". As to your deductions on the matter, I can only marvel at the keenness of your mind. They are as a searchlight penetrating the mists of time, illuminating our path into the perilous, and ever-nebulous (to the rest of us) future; There is a truly "Doylean" (Yes, that's a word because I say so.) quality to them. In retrospect, of course, the predictions seem self-evident, even obvious. And yet I, feeling now much as the fictional Dr. Watson must have felt on many an occasion, was unable to reach even the first link of your brilliant (but inescapeable) chain of deductions. (I did figure out the "Perl Crowd's Gonna Be Tee'd off" part, though; I'm not stupid.) I bow, sir, to your superior intellect. -Steve Bergman |
| PaulFerris Jan 02, 2005 10:06 AM EDT |
Steve, Thanks for the kind words and groveling! It's this kind of praise that makes me pray to God someone actually finds a way to boot the Linux kernel under Emacs. Thanks for retrospectively examining my predictions... I think :) Happy New Year, in any case --FeriCyde |
| dinotrac Jan 02, 2005 2:07 PM EDT |
Paul, Paul, Paul, if that really is you and not some bizarre PHP/MySQL AI come unhinged as it came to grips with the fact that foreign keys do not mean that someone has moved a group of Florida islands and made them suburbs of Sydney. Frankly, I lean to the AI theory. Your predictons are ironclad, uncommonly prescient given your less than sparkly track record on these things. Easier to believe that you web server has taken over than...well...you get my drift. To hear some perlistas (is there such a thing?), Prediction 0 has already happened, as Perl 6 is such a break from the past that it might as well be called Pythonwannabe. As to AI, we have just come through another Presidential election. Regardless of your red/blue predilictions, it's hard to keep a straight face these days and claim that what passes for real intelligence is any better than the artificial kind. Bill Gates as savior? That's a little hard to swallow, but, hey, why not? I should confess, that my prediction for Gates is a little different. I think he takes all that money and one-ups Paul Allen, who helped to finance Burt Rutan and his team at Scaled Composites as they won the X prize. My prediction: Gates finances the first manned mission to Mars. While there, the MicroNauts set up the first WIndows server and workstation ever to be completely safe against hacker attacks. Unfortunately, that only lasts three days as a peculiar 7-celled Martian plantimal succeeds in hacking the Windows kernel, causing the machines to sing Martian nursery rhymes. Bored by the lack of challenge, the plantimals evolve into party favors. Happy New Year! Dinotrac |
| PaulFerris Jan 02, 2005 2:52 PM EDT |
DinoTrac wrote: >My prediction: Gates finances the first manned mission to Mars. Dean, as usual, I see that you cannot comment on one of my articles without taking something I said completely out into left field. I never once mentioned space, and there you are, putting Gates out as some sort of rocket scientist (heck, maybe he is, after all. It takes one to secure a Windows XP box these days...). You space-infatuated hackers are all alike. You crouch in the dust of your shuttle simulators, nothing but the glow of the phony game console controls and the smell of rotting Flash Gordon comic books to guide your way. You pretend to push the world toward progress by talking up the whole mission to Mars gig, but we see through your little ploy. It's not progress, after all. Man didn't even make it to the moon, for that matter. Mars? Computer Security? What do those things have to do with each other? Talk about foreign keys man, that's out there! But you won't get away with it as long as the rest of us are on to you and the whole "boldly go where no one|man has gone before" gig. So go ahead and dream your impossible dreams! Just try and force congress to spend billions of dollars on cash on toys for Mars -- cash that would be better off spent putting computers in the libraries of today for the children in need now. Sure, supposedly Gates would fund it (he says) -- SURE. Gates will only be the start of it. Next it'll be NASA, then a special Mars shuttle (probably with cushy seats and flavored coffee for the 'Trac'd one, I'm sure). That's probably your plan -- and it all starts with these lame "predictions". Then, one day when you can't get a decent cup of star-bucks coffee because it's all been loaned to NASA, THEN we'll see what kind of tune you're singing. --FeriCyde Disclaimer: Dean and I are always doing this. This is, I repeat, just more noise :) |
| dinotrac Jan 02, 2005 5:39 PM EDT |
Paul, Paul, Paul,
Dear, sweet, well-meaning, addled little Paul. Of course you said nothing about Bill Gates sending men to Mars! That was my point!! You are failing to reach for the stars --er-- planets. Gates is a driven man. I think he'll do anything to find a place where a Windows machine can be safe from malicious hackers. Anything, of course, except for making WIndows safe from malicious hackers... |
| PaulFerris Jan 02, 2005 6:12 PM EDT |
Don't you realize? Making a computer safe from hackers by default would mean companies like SemenTech would go out of business. An entire MARKET would disappear overnight! That's cash out the door... Here, read this: http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/12/16/microsoft.spywar... Essentially, Microsoft hasn't just created one of the biggest security boondoggles the marketplace has ever seen, it's created a huge opportunity for the above companies. Here's one of my favorite quotes from that article: ]Microsoft's disclosure that it may eventually charge extra for Windows ]protection reflects a recognition inside the company that it could collect ]significant profits by helping to protect its customers. Wow! How do you like them apples, eh? You screw up big time, people lose tons of cash and time using your products, and you get to charge them because you can reap "significant profits" -- Nice :) Don't get me wrong, I'm as capitalist as they come -- but you should offer something the market needs, not liabilities, and then, after you've broken anti-trust law to ax all competition, screw your customer base for even more cash because of your lame incompetence. They claim all the time that they're all about TCO -- well, what have we got here but ... a raise in TCO! It's dark comedy, no matter how you slice it. --FeriCyde |
| schecbr Jan 03, 2005 5:10 AM EDT |
"Their's always more than one blah, blah, blah...".. Nobody likes you, ferris.. : ) |
| PaulFerris Jan 03, 2005 5:14 AM EDT |
Schecbr, what kind of a login identifier is that!?!? Anyway, if you look closely at the prediction, you will find many Perls of wisdom :P Miss you guys. --FeriCyde |
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