The Answer to Life, The Universe and Everything!
Harish pointed this out in his comment on my Google calculator post, but it’s such a cool thing that I just have to post it here. For those who may have read Douglas Adams, running this query on Google may be well worth it:
answer to life the universe and everything
Continuing in the spirit of filching from elsewhere, here’s a line from dogma. I’m not sure if this is the right place to say it, but it’s something I’ve believed for a very long time. Funny that it should come from a movie that ‘believes’ in the very concept this line demolishes.
Organized religion destroys who we are or who we can be by inhibiting our actions and decisions out of fear of an intangible parent-figure who shakes a finger at us from thousands of years ago and says “No, no!”
That’s it for tonight folks. Get some sleep.
Posted by Anil on September 3rd, 2003 :: Filed under
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Why do we hate Gates so much?
On Thursday in Detroit, Bill Gates explained his vision for using computers in the future which involved greater interoperability between devices, better spam protection and yes, greater security in software. I can almost hear people say, oh yeah, that’s like Pamela Anderson talking about being natural! After creating swiss cheese software that’s so vulnerable to viruses and worms, how can Microsoft preach about security? People are already talking about Microsoft’s abyssmal security record after committing the entire company to the goal of greater security.
Ahh, it feels so good to pin the blame on Microsoft.. the big goliath of computing.. but if we halt the blaster induced adrenalin and think carefully, we’ll realize that Microsoft is no more guilty of creating sloppy software than any other software maker. So they think that Linux or Mac OS is a better operating system just because they were not affected by the worm? Balderdash! I’m a long time lover of the Mac computer and OS X and I use Linux at home, but I have no illusions about them being more immune to viruses. The only reason they were not affected by the spate of viruses and worms unleased in the last couple of weeks was that no one wrote worms for these OSes. A worm depends on being able to crawl from computer to computer over a network in order to survive. Since they use highly OS specific holes to propagate, it makes sense to write worms for the OS which runs majority of the systems in use, which happens to be Microsoft’s OSes. If someone did take the trouble of writing a worm for Linux (which wouldn’t be awfully hard given the fact that the source code is out there for everyone to see), it would die out in a matter of minutes after being released for the simple reason that there would not be too many computers directly networked to each other and running Linux (and yes, the exact same distribution – which is an awfully hard requirement to meet). If Linux were to gain the popularity of Windows, it wouldn’t be long before worms started to colonize them!
Of course, Microsoft is guilty of many things, but if not for its monopolistic tendencies, the world would not be running so many computers today. If Linux/Unix was the dominant OS, we’d still be reading about computers being used in universities, and not actually using them. If Apple computers were the dominant ones, we’d still be gushing about those awesome machines and planning on buying one of them in our dreams (yes, that comes right after the cadillac dream). So while I use my iPod and drool over OS X and use my linux box, I’m still thankful that Microsoft is around.
Posted by Anil on September 1st, 2003 :: Filed under
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