edgecity

640K ought to be enough for anybody. - Bill Gates, 1981

It’s the 25th anniversary of Bill’s most famous words. I guess that some of us don’t know what he was referring to. He meant 640 thousand bytes of random access memory(RAM) storage on a personal computer. The computer I’m writing this post with has 2 billion bytes of RAM. 3125 times as much memory.

That’s when most personal computers didn’t even have hard drives! They had 2 floppy disk drives, and the disks were really “floppy”. Today’s personal computers were far off science fiction only 25 years ago.

How could Bill Gates, a brilliant guy, have been so wrong? What science fiction will be true in another 25?

Read anything by Ken Wilber and you may get a hint to the answers to these questions.

One more quickie quote along the same line. Remember DEC? PDP-11(with those colorful paddle switches!) and VAX computers of the 70’s and 80’s? Now this is funny:

There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home. - President and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977

“I think they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.” –Vice President Dick Cheney, on the Iraq insurgency, June 20, 2005 (Source) (Read more stupid Cheney quotes

America is being led by politicians who:

A. are liars
B. are unaware of reality
C. think we’re stupid
D. have no vision
E. all of the above

And the answer is…

decide for yourself…. the horrific reality is over 80 more bodies were discovered in Iraq today alone.

Reality. It’s not just a concept, it’s a matter of life and death.

I realized something this morning. Google doesn’t work anymore for me. Google, with its secret algorithms and its dedication to fairness has finally missed the point. After all these years of getting it right or at least trying to, Google has missed the mark by a mile.

Here’s why:

I noticed that Google reports some of my websites as having no links back to them, which of course is patently false. We all know there’s link spammers out there so that means Google must be doing something to mitigate that real problem. The trouble is how can they do it accurately? The answer is, they don’t. Sites like mine get left in the dust because I don’t have links from sites that meet their relevance criteria.

But wait, that’s not true either! I have a site with a link from a PR6 website that doesn’t appear either! Yet when I search for the keyword “mydomain.com”, presto, there it is in the search results on the PR6 site. So Google knows it is there and chooses not to publish that link as a link to my site using their link: tool.

Anyway all this is interesting but besides the point. I woke up this morning and realized what I really want is this:

ACCURATE AND COMPLETE SEARCH RESULTS!

I want it left to me to decide what’s relevant. Not Google. It’s as if Google has recreated the internet in its own image. You know, like God.

I don’t give a damn what’s “popular”, I want information. Some of the information I want may be on websites like mine that may not have enough visitors for Google to decide we’re important. Mr. Google, I want to decide that what’s relevant to me, I don’t need your help.
So now I call Google the POP SEARCH ENGINE. For kids, suckers and AOL users.

Technorati Tags: google, search, rant

Walter Cronkite is front man for a religous tolerance organization called the Interfaith Alliance trying to counteract the religous right’s attempts to turn the USA into a christian theocracy.

When I see the possibility of America being overrun by fundamentalist christians, I feel inspired to rise up and meet them with sanity founded in concrete observation and tempered with a spirit of love and tolerance.

In other words, if you want to believe in Armageddon, fine. You want to ensure that world destruction comes? No you cannot do that, and we will stop you if we can. Not by violent force, but by electing people who can see beyond moralistic judgment as the only source of truth.

If you’re interested in supporting freedom of religion, here’s a place to do that: Interfaith Alliance