[PLUG] Search engine dependency and Linux...

Michael C. Robinson plug_1 at robinson-west.com
Fri Jul 2 08:54:37 UTC 2010


The impossibility of creating an artificially intelligent computer
capable of fooling anybody communicating with it over the web or
via telephone that it is a person is at the heart of what it means
to be human.  Even to simulate an ant's intelligence takes a 
ridiculous amount of electrical and processing power.  The prize
for creating a computer system that the majority will mistake for
a human being has never been claimed and probably never will be
claimed.

Further on search engine dependency, imagine that you are standardized
on the 2.6.32 kernel and that you run the latest version, 13, of Fedora.
You update without creating your own local archive of the updates.
Fedora 16 comes out, you have data tied up in Fedora 13.  Linus has
moved on to the 3.0.0 kernel.  Fedora 16 is substantially different 
from Fedora 13.  What will google help you research?  Is Google going 
to be as helpful to people trying to support Fedora 13 compared to
people wanting to migrate to Fedora 16?  What if for whatever reason 
you can't migrate?  Maybe you have Pentium 4 era systems where Fedora 
16 requires as a bare minimum a quad core computer.

Google, invariably, is going to change for searches on Fedora when 13
reaches end of life and the 2.6 kernel reaches end of life.  Most people
probably want information on the newest kernel and the newest releases
of Linux.  For those who need to support yesterday's Linux for who knows
how long, is satisfying both groups with the same search engine really
practical?  If the HOWTO's fall behind, and they do, there is a lot of
inaccurate dated information.  Try to use the NFS HOWTO's these days.
The use of mknbi-linux and mkelf-linux is pretty much dated.  Took me
a long time to figure out that a pxelinux boot can only handle 
untagged kernels.  Fedora is considered a bleeding edge Linux distro,
but even old releases of CentOS can be in use past EOL.  I have CentOS
4.x servers even though CentOS 5.x is the currently supported system.

Sadly, Google doesn't seem to be able to narrow search results based on
the specific version of a Linux distribution that you want to search on.
Perhaps Google is running into problems like, is he/she searching
for Fedora 13 because he/she thinks that is the current release or does
this person really want information pertaining to that dated release?




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