SSH does a nicer job on placing validation in the eye of the beholder.
Key exchange is open and visible, and one time with fingerprints.
The hard exchange of asymmetric certificates then symmetric for session traffic is the same.
The SSL method of doing it for you and presenting colored tiles is odd, and the infinitely varying psychological games from browser version to browser version to attempt and scare people into paying attention is ridiculous.. if not debilitating. Worst of all is the IESC whatever Microsoft went berserk with.. its the first thing anyone who has to use IE disables.. its almost the anti-EULA.. you must agree to disable all security to prove abdication of Microsoft responsiblity for security. The OCSP.. wow is that nuts.. its the same "thought process".. we goofed and signed for a bunch of popular domains so our service is no longer trustworthy.. "disable [here]" to release us from all responsibility for our mistake.. never mind that your browser will take 30 seconds per domain included per page.. the average being 8 per page.
DNSSEC looks a little better in that certain domains are held to a higher standard for validation.
I think however it would be better to validate a path per session, perform a traceroute and do certificate validation for the entire path before traffic begins. The anonymous path is the real problem. Or make it an option when initating certain connections.. like with your bank.. document the trail.
The best experience I think would be Red Hat Linux. It's descended from Linux from the early days and is built on the red hat package manager (rpm). It also deliberately has a limited scope of packages and handles dependencies well. The online support is good and the online package repositories like EPEL for extra packages are fairly reliable.
Debian is in theory a great distro but its a bit much for a beginner who is only surveying an operating system.
Ubuntu and SuSE are kind of niche in that they serve specialist populations.. so the experience is tailored to the user or hardware populations.
I couldn't name a company that has escaped this Schwartz child limit. Microsoft isn't so much that type of company as a "holding company" and it has a longer life cycle. If companies were stars, Microsoft would be a red dwarf, Novell a yellow sun, Netscape a blue giant (or maybe a Eta Carinae that went Nova).
If Microsoft lasts as long it could be with us for billions and billions of years (lol).
Been there done that. I used my appetite for anything hackable and bought a TiVO back in 2002 then graduated to a homebuilt MythTV in 2005 once SDI quality video became computer files and MythTV began overloading me with files I just didn't have time to watch. I cut the Cable cord and kept Internet only. iTunes was a great training ground for picking and choosing the content I actually wanted to watch when I wanted to watch it.
The whole experience taught me that Entertainment via the TV Broadcast and weekly series thing is an addiction that can be broken simply by realizing there is more content out there than you could possibly consume in a lifetime. At some point it becomes boring.. and that's good for the pocket book. So then came NetFlix.. and that taught me it was foolish to try and keep up with the latest greatest movies out at the Video store or the Theatre.. sooner or later they end up on NetFlix.. but you know what.. the Personal Queue at Netflix let me build this huge imaginary library of things I thought I wanted to watch.. that had to compete with sleep.. and other things I'd rather be doing.. so I started walking.. spending more time in the kitchen and loosing weight.. going to the gym.. the "Overload" of afforability.. accessibility.. convenience just "killed" the Video Enterainment buzz for me.. it became uninteresting.
Now I regularly get iTunes to download only three video podcasts per week, have Netflix (1) DVD a week with unlimited streaming account.. (I watch something on Sunday about twice a month) and last bought a movie online through iTunes like three months ago. It's a chore to just get through this much media in a week.
Sometimes I discover something on Netflix or Hulu like "Being Human", "NCIS" or "Merlin" and run a mini-marathon in the summer over a Saturday.. but I rarely follow up with additional "Seasons" of the same.. too much work.. and the quality drops off. I never saw a single episode of "Lost" and after people told me "get with it you got 5 seasons to watch and catchup with before the finale..." that was such a buzz kill I never even looked it up on NetFlix.. my life is just a bit more unique and personal than that.. consumer programming is becoming less and less appealing.. its just not personal enough to hold my interest. I don't read a lot of paper books.. mostly digital journals these days.. but I can recall the personal experience of picking up a hand held analog book and reading that cover to cover.. that was cool.. TV has just accelerated away from that to mass produced porage that looks really unappealing.. worse I feel sad seeing friends kids glued to a TV set with an iPhone in their hands texting and getting overweight.
I don't think there with be so much a bandwidth crisis.
I think there will be some Darwinian evolution biologically.. perhaps a mass purge is in the works.. and demand may decrease soon. Beside we'll find more efficient codecs and protocols.. seems odd doesn't it we transmit high resolution pictures when we have a finite set of rods and cones in the eyes.. and our brains fill in much of the picture, colors, sounds sights and smells with less input than we're capable of actually percieving.. Retina display? why not just a transduction "implicit" display that maps images only into the field of vision the brain is actually paying attention to.. how about a "Hyper-perception display" which can sense where your looking and paint more detail in that field of view.. like Layers only for reality... just sayin
Coming from a Mac World the most convenient and logical path would be like the Apple store, go to the Microsoft store.
http://www.microsoftstore.com
Then select [Computers] from the Nav list to the Left.
It's not one to one, but its ideology is very similar. You have a limited number of laptops, desktops and tablets. I favor HP, Lenovo and Samsung for their build quality and aftersale notifications and updates, specific to the hardware.
Microsoft spends extra time customizing the OS so that its optimized for the hardware, tweaked as it were, and does not allow salesware, adware or demoware on their version of the Microsoft OS store experience.
Based on your wifes preferences you might want to consider a Business class of the OS, generally called "Professional" which means it comes with remote support and corporate networking features like Active Directory "join" support.
There is not an "Appstore" experience that I'm aware of yet.. but Intel has an App Market of sorts..Microsoft did have an App store experience at one time but discontinued it. Apple subsequently started their App store experience and succeeded (prior Art?) so you'll still have to purchase Office.. but you can take advantage of her business relationships (such as does she work for a School, State or Federal government agency) to get the product at reduced pricing. Family packs were also tried with Microsoft and come and go periodically.
Office is also not a prerequesite.. there are free alternatives like Libre Office, check Wikipedia for the history. However many products in the Microsoft ecosystem require or share common files with the Office suite.. and installing one without the Office suite already installed may lead to dependencies being automatically installed which could be hard to keep up with. Its rather like YUM on Linux you have to have some common points of reference for software libraries and they do the best they can to do them for you you..Net is Microsoft's version of Java its also called "Managed Code" and generally you have to have one installed for many management apps to work. Windows 7 I believe is the first to even include a version of.Net as part of the base install. Like Java however one version of.Net is generally not enough.. your mileage may vary but the call interface between versions varies.. new calls are added old one removed.. sometimes with warning.. sometimes not.
Java is a manual install.. and you generally need that for many things. Microsoft can no longer install it for you.. so you have to do it yourself. Again one version is generally not enough. The Java update mechanism is also very annoying.
Flash is yet another call interface you'll need for most things and updates rapidly.
And alternative browsers like Safari, Chrome, IE (depends on flavor of the month), and Firefox.. one browser is usually not enough.. we need a bookmark manager that selects the browser based on the URL.. funnily enough.. the fragmentation is really that bad.
There is a lot of drama over whether to hunt down and disable "all" updaters.. or whether thats safe behavior.. generally update mechanisms are going through a breakdown right now where they conflict and can easily leave a system unusable. Some discussion over an Update API for the OS to manage conflicts of interest are underway... to lock out Updaters that don't ask for permission.. many antivirus programs mistake rouge updaters as "Viral" activity. UAC just wasn't flexible enough.. and often gets disabled.. more so than usually admitted.
Microsoft makes Security Essentials for home users.. its basic anitvirus and antispam for free and gets updated regularly.. but if the laptop is joined to a domain there may be reporting requirements.. like this system has been scanned on such an dsuch a day back to the domain admins.. or XYZ virus was detected and fixed.. or WUV patch was applied on such and such a date to prevent FritzwillyConficker18 infections. Then you
I think it has to do more with a natural effect, and people living longer, or investing more of their free time in movies.
Used to be people had rather finite lives and joined a cycle of movies "in progress".. like taking up a magazine subscription. In the beginning its simple and story building, after a while things depend on other things and you have to have a history with a project to appreciate its depth. Stories seem and do get more complicated. But sooner or later the train has left the station and they are too complicated to grasp with a brief investment in time, no matter how "good" your friends say a show is.
Movies are series but generally (or used to be) with better special effects, music, and more experienced actors (or used to be).
Now the poster about it being a symptom of a profit making business with no regard for entertainment has a point. But I think malice has no place where ignorance will suffice. For want of an understanding it just makes sense to hire young fresh faces that seem to have a bit of pretend about them and a nice look.
One of the more interesting authors (and I do mean authors) are comic book writers and people like Kevin Smith and JMS of Babylon 5, they actually do get the problem and have worked within the system as best they could to deal with it. I'm not entirely sure they are conscious of what they are doing (in my opinion) but I think Joe has the schooling to know what he's doing.
Ron Howard may also have a clue, somewhat like Steve Speilberg did back at another entertainment crisis point in history. And Ron hired JMS recently.. which shows some elgance of understanding.
Whether they sort it out and fix the 'problem' will be intellectual entertainment all its own.
It looks like people are working on the problem themselves too.
As long as I can recall people have ganged together and shared ideas and bubbles of consciousness, like a group of trekkies they see the same or similar movies and have similar likes. There are the occasional guilty pleasures and outlyers or indies.. but for the most part they stay within their comfort zone.
And for a while people collected massive VHS and DVD collections.. for a rainy day?.. as a safety net against.. 500 channels and nothings on? or can't get out to the video store or movies because kids are too young.. ect..
But now with Cable on the decline.. ceeding to NetFlix and download movies over the Internet on demand.. people are building whole new online bubbles of friends and family.. sharing ideas.. and the money scene is getting very complicated.
I think movies and videos will survive as a business.. including the older ones.. but the values and costs are going to have to someday carryng the cost, of their archiving and downloading as a floor cost of access, with some nominal surcharge of simply remaining accessible.
When you think about it the treasures of Ancient Egypt and Mummies and such also had a floor cost and were a form of entertainment.. eventually however that cost exceeded what society could afford and they disappeared into the dust. Well thats another thought train.. style.. what's in and out is more a symptom of what's in the bank than what people really want.. although calling it style is a great self deception for a while.. and soon we forget the real reasons.
The rovers are interesting critters.. not unlike their older sibling Pioneer 10.
I guess we've given up on artificial intelligence, but I rather think what we altogether thought was a mind of information is actually a mind of situation and evolving spirit that simply exists in the moment. If that be true, even an Ant could have artificial intelligence.
Its interesting we drive these things into the ground, or until they run out of power, or we loose interest.
It may be lame, But I'd think it might be more interesting in the long run to upload a final survival program into these critters and turn them loose.. perhaps in the long run we'll come to those ideas and terms. Perhaps years from now when astronauts decide to land there they really will find martians!
Of course if we have a nuclear or biological melt down, then perhaps they will out live us.
There was a SciFi story long ago called NightFall.. it would make an interesting animated short or story to tell the story from the rovers perspective... and in the end they are given their freedom and continue to look up at the night to the twinkle in the sky where their makers live, and then.. they loose contact, perhaps they merely lost interest in their creations.. or perhaps the makers are no more, and they truly are all alone.. and as the cold surrounds and grips them they fold up their solar wings preparing for another martian winter and the rovers go to sleep.. perchance to dream.. of other worlds.
Get a phone or pager that specializes in that corridor and the areas you vist.
Like a Verizon phone and a Sprint phone, or whatever.
Also consider the "less" cheap Sony Ericsson line of phones.. or phones with quote "excellent call quality"
Call quality usually translates into more signal sensitivty in the same area where other phones just don't pick up a signal.
I switched from Motorola phone to Sony and went from barely 1 bar of signal to 6 bars in the same exact place.. sacrifice feature bloat for dam reliability.
And consider analog versus digital roaming features.. as will as GSM coverage.. cell phones look simple.. but they break down into lots of categories and technologies.. GSM is I believe one of the latest signal technologies and isn't widely available outside metro areas.
I know when I visited Cannon Beach up there a few years ago my "digital" phone switched to "analog" romaing automatically.. and most people who's cell phones didn't work were astonished that in the Washington state area, analog coverage was far far better than digital coverage.. at that time.
And I've heard other stories about Seattle.. far from being a bastion of high tech.. the services industries surrounding the Microsoft campus tend to be extremely low tech.. they may have transplanted the technies.. but they didn't transplant the infrastructure of the big city up there.. check it out.. what your looking for may not be in newer gadgets.. but actually in older lower tech!
Tranlate that into looking for quote "world phones" they tend to be big and clunky.. and have tri-band support or more.. and cost alot for few features.. but they work.. and most have SMS paging capabilites or some text paging features of some kind.
At the very least, have a modem call your number and don't even bother to leave a voice message, the simple fact it logs a call to your phone from a number you know is associated with your server room should alert you so that you know to check the server room.
This maybe on topic, but who knows. I was watching the second season opener of Enterprise last night and thinking about Daniels.. and how much we've changed our ways of thinking about us and our bodies. We've gone from thinking the seat of the mind and soul was the heart to our brains, we've gone from thinking life was immutable to rioting against stem cell research. And it seems to happen very quickly. I don't see the impetus for change, any better than any other futurist I think.. but in that Star trek episode where Daniels was all mixed up with different parts of him from different times.. I started thinking. What if a future person conceived of himself not the sum of his parts, from knee injuries as a kid, to pill popping as a teenager.. what if he conceived of himself as the some of all his ancestors.. and could actively effect them.. and less outlandish scifi.. what if we conceived of ourselves as a community of cells and opened up a dialog.. and could reach greater potentials within our own biology? Weird concepts.. but I think it was Francis Crick who was exploring the 'direction' of conciousness just before his death.. found it fascinating.. haven't you ever noticed how your 'attention' seems to steer your accomplishments and your destiny.. like driving a car.. if you look in one direction too long.. pretty soon your liable to be there? I guess my point is.. perhaps like Slashdot or Google.. raising attention and capturing imagination can often lead us to places and ends we really never took serious before.
I think the whole concept of avoiding XP is silly in the extreme.
It will happen, no matter what.
Windows is the user standard, and for good reason.
It all comes down to User Interface testing and
experience. Someone had to foot the bill to find
out what worked, and then educated people how to
use the widgets that were discovered to work.
Netscape versus Internet Explorer?
It was much darker than your imagination.. IE
was quite simply the trojan horse to spread the
familarity with standard Microsoft Windows
controls, it was the best marketing seducement
ever!
Okay, now enough with the conspiracy theories.
What better way to sell business software than
sneak the educational overhead in through
Entertainment? Games, Free software, Browsers.
Fisher Price Interface.. Guess where the next
generation is coming from. And don't tell me
you think its targeted at kids.
Fact is Disneyland, Six Flags, Fisher Price
would horrify and permenantly damage children
dragged through their pearly gates, lest their
parents weren't dizzily enjoying themselves..
retribution for the hazing ritual their parents
put them through at that age.
Rather, Fisher Price plays towards parents and
grand parents.. after all if it looks that goofy
it's got to be easy for an adult, right?
As for reality, if you can't afford a sysadmin,
XP servers will close the deal.. then you can scoot, hook them up with Microsoft support.
As for longer terms.. everyone knows Microsoft
repackages standards and makes sales off
opensource rethreaded as DLLs.. get over it.
They do a service themselves, Microsoft is probably the largest, most successful Opensource with redefined licening terms in history.
What's the alternative? It's not some single
sysadmin redeveloping or finishing the development of all the half-baked standard opensource reference software.
Truth be known, and this is a deep dark secret.. the first "real", complete, software solution company has yet to evolve.
Company in a box? Please, get me a Kleenex, and pass the QuickBooks cd.
Slashdot Mirror
SSH does a nicer job on placing validation in the eye of the beholder.
Key exchange is open and visible, and one time with fingerprints.
The hard exchange of asymmetric certificates then symmetric for session traffic is the same.
The SSL method of doing it for you and presenting colored tiles is odd, and the infinitely varying psychological games from browser version to browser version to attempt and scare people into paying attention is ridiculous.. if not debilitating. Worst of all is the IESC whatever Microsoft went berserk with.. its the first thing anyone who has to use IE disables.. its almost the anti-EULA.. you must agree to disable all security to prove abdication of Microsoft responsiblity for security. The OCSP.. wow is that nuts.. its the same "thought process".. we goofed and signed for a bunch of popular domains so our service is no longer trustworthy.. "disable [here]" to release us from all responsibility for our mistake.. never mind that your browser will take 30 seconds per domain included per page.. the average being 8 per page.
DNSSEC looks a little better in that certain domains are held to a higher standard for validation.
I think however it would be better to validate a path per session, perform a traceroute and do certificate validation for the entire path before traffic begins. The anonymous path is the real problem. Or make it an option when initating certain connections.. like with your bank.. document the trail.
From a pure perspective.
The best experience I think would be Red Hat Linux. It's descended from Linux from the early days and is built on the red hat package manager (rpm). It also deliberately has a limited scope of packages and handles dependencies well. The online support is good and the online package repositories like EPEL for extra packages are fairly reliable.
Debian is in theory a great distro but its a bit much for a beginner who is only surveying an operating system.
Ubuntu and SuSE are kind of niche in that they serve specialist populations.. so the experience is tailored to the user or hardware populations.
Software companies have their own "physical laws" of operation.
1. Innovate
2. Incorporate
3. Reorganize
4. Downsize
5. Distribute the proceeds
It's just completing the cycle.
I couldn't name a company that has escaped this Schwartz child limit. Microsoft isn't so much that type of company as a "holding company" and it has a longer life cycle. If companies were stars, Microsoft would be a red dwarf, Novell a yellow sun, Netscape a blue giant (or maybe a Eta Carinae that went Nova).
If Microsoft lasts as long it could be with us for billions and billions of years (lol).
Been there done that. I used my appetite for anything hackable and bought a TiVO back in 2002 then graduated to a homebuilt MythTV in 2005 once SDI quality video became computer files and MythTV began overloading me with files I just didn't have time to watch. I cut the Cable cord and kept Internet only. iTunes was a great training ground for picking and choosing the content I actually wanted to watch when I wanted to watch it.
The whole experience taught me that Entertainment via the TV Broadcast and weekly series thing is an addiction that can be broken simply by realizing there is more content out there than you could possibly consume in a lifetime. At some point it becomes boring.. and that's good for the pocket book. So then came NetFlix.. and that taught me it was foolish to try and keep up with the latest greatest movies out at the Video store or the Theatre.. sooner or later they end up on NetFlix.. but you know what.. the Personal Queue at Netflix let me build this huge imaginary library of things I thought I wanted to watch.. that had to compete with sleep.. and other things I'd rather be doing.. so I started walking.. spending more time in the kitchen and loosing weight.. going to the gym.. the "Overload" of afforability.. accessibility.. convenience just "killed" the Video Enterainment buzz for me.. it became uninteresting.
Now I regularly get iTunes to download only three video podcasts per week, have Netflix (1) DVD a week with unlimited streaming account.. (I watch something on Sunday about twice a month) and last bought a movie online through iTunes like three months ago. It's a chore to just get through this much media in a week.
Sometimes I discover something on Netflix or Hulu like "Being Human", "NCIS" or "Merlin" and run a mini-marathon in the summer over a Saturday.. but I rarely follow up with additional "Seasons" of the same.. too much work.. and the quality drops off. I never saw a single episode of "Lost" and after people told me "get with it you got 5 seasons to watch and catchup with before the finale..." that was such a buzz kill I never even looked it up on NetFlix.. my life is just a bit more unique and personal than that.. consumer programming is becoming less and less appealing.. its just not personal enough to hold my interest. I don't read a lot of paper books.. mostly digital journals these days.. but I can recall the personal experience of picking up a hand held analog book and reading that cover to cover.. that was cool.. TV has just accelerated away from that to mass produced porage that looks really unappealing.. worse I feel sad seeing friends kids glued to a TV set with an iPhone in their hands texting and getting overweight.
I don't think there with be so much a bandwidth crisis.
I think there will be some Darwinian evolution biologically.. perhaps a mass purge is in the works.. and demand may decrease soon. Beside we'll find more efficient codecs and protocols.. seems odd doesn't it we transmit high resolution pictures when we have a finite set of rods and cones in the eyes.. and our brains fill in much of the picture, colors, sounds sights and smells with less input than we're capable of actually percieving.. Retina display? why not just a transduction "implicit" display that maps images only into the field of vision the brain is actually paying attention to.. how about a "Hyper-perception display" which can sense where your looking and paint more detail in that field of view.. like Layers only for reality. .. just sayin
Coming from a Mac World the most convenient and logical path would be like the Apple store, go to the Microsoft store.
http://www.microsoftstore.com
Then select [Computers] from the Nav list to the Left.
It's not one to one, but its ideology is very similar. You have a limited number of laptops, desktops and tablets. I favor HP, Lenovo and Samsung for their build quality and aftersale notifications and updates, specific to the hardware.
Microsoft spends extra time customizing the OS so that its optimized for the hardware, tweaked as it were, and does not allow salesware, adware or demoware on their version of the Microsoft OS store experience.
Based on your wifes preferences you might want to consider a Business class of the OS, generally called "Professional" which means it comes with remote support and corporate networking features like Active Directory "join" support.
There is not an "Appstore" experience that I'm aware of yet.. but Intel has an App Market of sorts..Microsoft did have an App store experience at one time but discontinued it. Apple subsequently started their App store experience and succeeded (prior Art?) so you'll still have to purchase Office.. but you can take advantage of her business relationships (such as does she work for a School, State or Federal government agency) to get the product at reduced pricing. Family packs were also tried with Microsoft and come and go periodically.
Office is also not a prerequesite.. there are free alternatives like Libre Office, check Wikipedia for the history. However many products in the Microsoft ecosystem require or share common files with the Office suite.. and installing one without the Office suite already installed may lead to dependencies being automatically installed which could be hard to keep up with. Its rather like YUM on Linux you have to have some common points of reference for software libraries and they do the best they can to do them for you you. .Net is Microsoft's version of Java its also called "Managed Code" and generally you have to have one installed for many management apps to work. Windows 7 I believe is the first to even include a version of .Net as part of the base install. Like Java however one version of .Net is generally not enough.. your mileage may vary but the call interface between versions varies.. new calls are added old one removed.. sometimes with warning.. sometimes not.
Java is a manual install.. and you generally need that for many things. Microsoft can no longer install it for you.. so you have to do it yourself. Again one version is generally not enough. The Java update mechanism is also very annoying.
Flash is yet another call interface you'll need for most things and updates rapidly.
And alternative browsers like Safari, Chrome, IE (depends on flavor of the month), and Firefox.. one browser is usually not enough.. we need a bookmark manager that selects the browser based on the URL.. funnily enough.. the fragmentation is really that bad.
There is a lot of drama over whether to hunt down and disable "all" updaters.. or whether thats safe behavior.. generally update mechanisms are going through a breakdown right now where they conflict and can easily leave a system unusable. Some discussion over an Update API for the OS to manage conflicts of interest are underway... to lock out Updaters that don't ask for permission.. many antivirus programs mistake rouge updaters as "Viral" activity. UAC just wasn't flexible enough.. and often gets disabled.. more so than usually admitted.
Microsoft makes Security Essentials for home users.. its basic anitvirus and antispam for free and gets updated regularly.. but if the laptop is joined to a domain there may be reporting requirements.. like this system has been scanned on such an dsuch a day back to the domain admins.. or XYZ virus was detected and fixed.. or WUV patch was applied on such and such a date to prevent FritzwillyConficker18 infections. Then you
Leading the way to IPv6 by cornering the market on IPv4
I think it has to do more with a natural effect, and people living longer, or investing more of their free time in movies.
Used to be people had rather finite lives and joined a cycle of movies "in progress".. like taking up a magazine subscription. In the beginning its simple and story building, after a while things depend on other things and you have to have a history with a project to appreciate its depth. Stories seem and do get more complicated. But sooner or later the train has left the station and they are too complicated to grasp with a brief investment in time, no matter how "good" your friends say a show is.
Movies are series but generally (or used to be) with better special effects, music, and more experienced actors (or used to be).
Now the poster about it being a symptom of a profit making business with no regard for entertainment has a point. But I think malice has no place where ignorance will suffice. For want of an understanding it just makes sense to hire young fresh faces that seem to have a bit of pretend about them and a nice look.
One of the more interesting authors (and I do mean authors) are comic book writers and people like Kevin Smith and JMS of Babylon 5, they actually do get the problem and have worked within the system as best they could to deal with it. I'm not entirely sure they are conscious of what they are doing (in my opinion) but I think Joe has the schooling to know what he's doing.
Ron Howard may also have a clue, somewhat like Steve Speilberg did back at another entertainment crisis point in history. And Ron hired JMS recently.. which shows some elgance of understanding.
Whether they sort it out and fix the 'problem' will be intellectual entertainment all its own.
It looks like people are working on the problem themselves too.
As long as I can recall people have ganged together and shared ideas and bubbles of consciousness, like a group of trekkies they see the same or similar movies and have similar likes. There are the occasional guilty pleasures and outlyers or indies.. but for the most part they stay within their comfort zone.
And for a while people collected massive VHS and DVD collections.. for a rainy day?.. as a safety net against.. 500 channels and nothings on? or can't get out to the video store or movies because kids are too young.. ect..
But now with Cable on the decline.. ceeding to NetFlix and download movies over the Internet on demand.. people are building whole new online bubbles of friends and family.. sharing ideas.. and the money scene is getting very complicated.
I think movies and videos will survive as a business.. including the older ones.. but the values and costs are going to have to someday carryng the cost, of their archiving and downloading as a floor cost of access, with some nominal surcharge of simply remaining accessible.
When you think about it the treasures of Ancient Egypt and Mummies and such also had a floor cost and were a form of entertainment.. eventually however that cost exceeded what society could afford and they disappeared into the dust. Well thats another thought train.. style.. what's in and out is more a symptom of what's in the bank than what people really want.. although calling it style is a great self deception for a while.. and soon we forget the real reasons.
well.. those are my thoughts anyway.
I think dreamers spring forth from people with well endowed bank accounts. And Nerds are a kind of natural dreamer without a bank account.
Eclectic birds of a feather flock together.
Sort of like the old feudal courts.. there were the elite and the entertainers.
Now don't carry this analogy too far.. or you'll find yourself comparing SV to a Circus.
I think Bob Crigley exposed this phenomena adequately long ago.
The rovers are interesting critters.. not unlike their older sibling Pioneer 10.
I guess we've given up on artificial intelligence, but I rather think what we altogether thought was a mind of information is actually a mind of situation and evolving spirit that simply exists in the moment. If that be true, even an Ant could have artificial intelligence.
Its interesting we drive these things into the ground, or until they run out of power, or we loose interest.
It may be lame, But I'd think it might be more interesting in the long run to upload a final survival program into these critters and turn them loose.. perhaps in the long run we'll come to those ideas and terms. Perhaps years from now when astronauts decide to land there they really will find martians!
Of course if we have a nuclear or biological melt down, then perhaps they will out live us.
There was a SciFi story long ago called NightFall.. it would make an interesting animated short or story to tell the story from the rovers perspective... and in the end they are given their freedom and continue to look up at the night to the twinkle in the sky where their makers live, and then.. they loose contact, perhaps they merely lost interest in their creations.. or perhaps the makers are no more, and they truly are all alone.. and as the cold surrounds and grips them they fold up their solar wings preparing for another martian winter and the rovers go to sleep.. perchance to dream.. of other worlds.
Get a phone or pager that specializes in that corridor and the areas you vist.
Like a Verizon phone and a Sprint phone, or whatever.
Also consider the "less" cheap Sony Ericsson line of phones.. or phones with quote "excellent call quality"
Call quality usually translates into more signal sensitivty in the same area where other phones just don't pick up a signal.
I switched from Motorola phone to Sony and went from barely 1 bar of signal to 6 bars in the same exact place.. sacrifice feature bloat for dam reliability.
And consider analog versus digital roaming features.. as will as GSM coverage.. cell phones look simple.. but they break down into lots of categories and technologies.. GSM is I believe one of the latest signal technologies and isn't widely available outside metro areas.
I know when I visited Cannon Beach up there a few years ago my "digital" phone switched to "analog" romaing automatically.. and most people who's cell phones didn't work were astonished that in the Washington state area, analog coverage was far far better than digital coverage.. at that time.
And I've heard other stories about Seattle.. far from being a bastion of high tech.. the services industries surrounding the Microsoft campus tend to be extremely low tech.. they may have transplanted the technies.. but they didn't transplant the infrastructure of the big city up there.. check it out.. what your looking for may not be in newer gadgets.. but actually in older lower tech!
Tranlate that into looking for quote "world phones" they tend to be big and clunky.. and have tri-band support or more.. and cost alot for few features.. but they work.. and most have SMS paging capabilites or some text paging features of some kind.
At the very least, have a modem call your number and don't even bother to leave a voice message, the simple fact it logs a call to your phone from a number you know is associated with your server room should alert you so that you know to check the server room.
This maybe on topic, but who knows. I was watching the second season opener of Enterprise last night and thinking about Daniels.. and how much we've changed our ways of thinking about us and our bodies. We've gone from thinking the seat of the mind and soul was the heart to our brains, we've gone from thinking life was immutable to rioting against stem cell research. And it seems to happen very quickly. I don't see the impetus for change, any better than any other futurist I think.. but in that Star trek episode where Daniels was all mixed up with different parts of him from different times.. I started thinking. What if a future person conceived of himself not the sum of his parts, from knee injuries as a kid, to pill popping as a teenager.. what if he conceived of himself as the some of all his ancestors.. and could actively effect them.. and less outlandish scifi.. what if we conceived of ourselves as a community of cells and opened up a dialog.. and could reach greater potentials within our own biology? Weird concepts.. but I think it was Francis Crick who was exploring the 'direction' of conciousness just before his death.. found it fascinating.. haven't you ever noticed how your 'attention' seems to steer your accomplishments and your destiny.. like driving a car.. if you look in one direction too long.. pretty soon your liable to be there? I guess my point is.. perhaps like Slashdot or Google.. raising attention and capturing imagination can often lead us to places and ends we really never took serious before.
I think the whole concept of avoiding XP is silly in the extreme.
It will happen, no matter what.
Windows is the user standard, and for good reason.
It all comes down to User Interface testing and
experience. Someone had to foot the bill to find
out what worked, and then educated people how to
use the widgets that were discovered to work.
Netscape versus Internet Explorer?
It was much darker than your imagination.. IE
was quite simply the trojan horse to spread the
familarity with standard Microsoft Windows
controls, it was the best marketing seducement
ever!
Okay, now enough with the conspiracy theories.
What better way to sell business software than
sneak the educational overhead in through
Entertainment? Games, Free software, Browsers.
Fisher Price Interface.. Guess where the next
generation is coming from. And don't tell me
you think its targeted at kids.
Fact is Disneyland, Six Flags, Fisher Price
would horrify and permenantly damage children
dragged through their pearly gates, lest their
parents weren't dizzily enjoying themselves..
retribution for the hazing ritual their parents
put them through at that age.
Rather, Fisher Price plays towards parents and
grand parents.. after all if it looks that goofy
it's got to be easy for an adult, right?
As for reality, if you can't afford a sysadmin,
XP servers will close the deal.. then you can scoot, hook them up with Microsoft support.
As for longer terms.. everyone knows Microsoft
repackages standards and makes sales off
opensource rethreaded as DLLs.. get over it.
They do a service themselves, Microsoft is probably the largest, most successful Opensource with redefined licening terms in history.
What's the alternative? It's not some single
sysadmin redeveloping or finishing the development of all the half-baked standard opensource reference software.
Truth be known, and this is a deep dark secret.. the first "real", complete, software solution company has yet to evolve.
Company in a box? Please, get me a Kleenex, and pass the QuickBooks cd.