on iTunes, you can get crappy compressed music, fully DRMed. For the same price you can get a full-quality CD, and rip it to whatever you like. Still, people love iTunes... and now iTVSeries.
Gmail complains about Opera but lets me use it, and I found no incompatibilities. Yahoo Mail Beta won't let me log in with Opera, so I'm still on the old, HTML-based system.
I'm still using mainly Yahoo, though. I love their spam filter, which catches all but 1 of the 60+ spams I get per day, and only flags 1 or 2 false positives per month.
I've played aroung with Gmail, but didn't see anything worth the trouble of changing my official email address. I'va also played around with Yahoo mail v2 via Firefox. Apart from the fact that I prefer Opera and think it's a waste to run 2 browsers, and didn't really see any reason to drop yahoo mail v1 either. The new interface is very outlook express-like, but for me it doesn't really work any better than the old one.
I'm wondering if I'm missing something here, since I like Yahoo's original, several years old interface, as much if not more the the new and imporved interfaces of Gmail and Yahoo v2. As long as I have good spam filters and nicknames, I'm happy.
because making & maintaining computers + creating & translating software is sure to be a LOT more expensive than custom-designing one book per school year, both to set-up and to operate.
and the last study I saw, admittedly a long while back, showed that computer-aided learning was worse than book-and-paper learning. Do computers actually impair learning ?
- it's smaller, lighter, faster than Firefox, and just as safe and compatible - mouse gestures are included in the standard install - there are slightly less frequent updates/bugfixes to download for the core program, and since I don't use any plugins (again, mouse gestures are standard), a LOT fewer plugin updates;-) - I think Firefox does not have "sessions" (a bunch of URLs and their associated histories), that I can load automatically at startup, or at any time thereafter. I use that a lot: when i launch Opera on my main pc, it automatically opens My Yahoo, my 2 main mail accounts, and Slashdot. For when I go shopping for computer parts, I have a session with my favorite shops and review sites... - I like Opera's download manager better, but that's mainly aesthetics/ergonomics, not functionnality. - I'm soooo used to typing F2 + "g dodo bird" when I want to google about the dodo.
Then again, I started using Opera almost as soon as it came out on Windows, 7+ years ago, so I'm set in my ways now (and I paid for it;-) ) .
Let me return the question: apart from the quite valid philosophical one of Free Software being A Good Thing (tm), is there any reason to switch to Firefox ? I have it installed on several PCs, but I see no reason to switch over to it.
The one thing I don't like about Opera is that, if a fatal problem ( OS crash, network crash, other App fatal crash - note that Opera almost never crashes - ) occurs when you JUST opened a page (before a single byte of it has been downloaded), Opera loses track of that page, and opens a blank page instead with no URL. All the other, fully- or partially-downloaded pages, automatically reload when you re-start Opera.
I was an independent consultant at the time, and my departure was a long time coming, it took noone by surprise. On the day it was formally announced, I got locked out of all computer systems.
I found that both insulting and stupid.
Insulting, because a) I'm not a thief nor a sabotager, and I had hoped that after working together for over a year, Management had at least got that b) if I were, I'm intelligent enough to do my damage before, not after, my departure was announced. Management missed that, too:-/ Stupid, because I fully intended to keep working during my notice, and they wanted me to, only with no access to the databases, I couldn't really work.
So, it hurt my feelings a fair deal, more so because it was a very small (10 person) company, and there was no SOP for departures.
They were the unprofessional ones. I tried to remain professional even after their antics. I shut out my direct boss 'coz I was soooo pissed with her, and wrapped everything up with her boss. I even managed to not badmouth my boss, which I was itching to do.
If I were to do it again, I'll try to speak with my boss and the head honcho a bit more, right before officially quitting, so they could feel more confident of my state of mind, and we could work out something for the notice's duration. i think doing it before rather than right after is important psychologically. I don't mind being payed for doing nothing, though.
I think the issue is not really the actual professional people looking for anti-terrorism data but the possible personnal and political misuse of that data. Longer-term, it does make witch hunts and Mc Carthyism easier, but I've faith that such things are behind us for a while. On the personal side, we've had problems in France such as a judge (or cop) gathering data off the police/terrorist databases for his masonic lodge... On the political side, president Miterrand put phone taps on famous actresses (and of course journalists and political opponents;-) ).
I think the privacy issue is important, but looking at the US from the outside, what worries me most, apart from success of irrational discourse such as linking 9/11 and Iraq, is the ability to incarcerate almost anyone without due process, and to threaten anyone with that until they agree / confess / do anything they want you to do. That might be necessary, but what strikes me is the total lack of, at least, some feedback, evaluation, or clear responsability chain. Not even with a 1, 2 or 5 years delay to allow the antiterrorist people to do their job. Basically, cops have a free rein, and there won't be any paybacks ever if they misuse their powers. I know a few cops, and knowing they have all this power is NOT a reassuring prospect. Cops are rarely college graduates:-/. Plus, cops and very conservative politicians are way too chummy for my taste.
I'm actually a bit scared of going to the US. Are they tracking my slashdot posts ? Will I show up in some kind of database ? What if a cop decides to harass me because I'm French ?
Mmmm, this is NOT a terrorist attack, which only requires a handful of people, but a lot of money and organization. It's riots, which require little money, but a lot of people.
... by volume. In poor markets, LCDs are still to expensive for doing the same job, less well, their only advantage is that they take up less space and look cool. In richer markets, people are starting to realize that CRTs' image quality is better. I don't know how fast LCD technology will progress, but i'm guessing CRTs will prove a bit more resilient than most people expect. So I'm not sure it's a smart move for Sony, especially since their Trinitron screens are quite good, though not the only game in town anymore.
What also bothers me about Sony is that they fancy themselves a high-end brand, but I had a couple of discmans fail right out of the box, sent each 3 times for service, they came back as broken as they went (so quality AND quality control AND service suck). Luckily, my retailer let me exchange them for another brand. I wrote to Sony, got a started "too bad" customer service letter.
Maybe they'll come out of their memory stick delusion sometime too... many people I talk to won't buy Sony stuff because of these. I know I won't.
Their latest phones, notebooks and digital cameras seem fine, though.
While in pinciple I fully agree that it's wrong to deny a drug for costs reason, I'm wondering where the limit is. Drugs save lives (well, the right one at the right time). Should they then all be free ? In every country ? For everyone ? Then we need to nationalize drugmaking... I can't wait for all the innovation that'll ensue.
Maybe there should be some kind of balance, depending on disease severity, cost, maybe a stadard price for emergency cases...
All of which is not discussed here... I'm really wondering what you guys are basing your opinions on.
Pen and paper to be banned to safety reasons
on
Google Terror Threat
·
· Score: 1
... in other news, it has recently been discovered that pen and paper have been used to plan several terrorist attacks. A law to ban them is currently being drafted.
While I like in theory the ability to download music, TV episodes, and other media off of the internet for a negligible price, I take exception to getting it in a low-quality format.
Currently, I'm ripping my CDs to FLAC for use on my stereo, and to MP3 or WMA for my MP3 player. I've tried several formats, and any lossy format just sounds bad on my stereo. So I won't be buying any AAC files from ITMS: it costs about the same as a regular CD, but offers a lower sound quality, and is heavily DRMed on top of it, and you're forced to use iTunes.
Same goes for the videos/TV shows/films: I can buy DVDs, and rip them to any format (for my Palm Tungsten, motorola e398...), and still enjoy the best video and sound quality by watching the original DVD. $2 is not expensive for a TV show, but it IS expensive for a TV show you can only watch on a minuscule screen, at a very low resolution. If I'm shelling out $2 for a show, I want it up on my big screen. There's enough good, old stuff around that I have yet to see, so I can wait for the DVDs to come out, and not rush to get a next-day fix.
If we should let such examples pass as actually nice (kill all the men, take the wives... but ONLY if they don't surrender) BECAUSE they are forward-thinking **for their times**, and not as the utterly abhorrent attitude we judge it to be today, that means that the stuff in the Bible is not absolute, but must be judged within the perspective of their times.
One can't help wondering what has been obsoleted, what hasn't, how outdated stuff should be adapted to today's circumstances, who does the apraising / adapting...
If that were software, we would say it's time for a complete rewrite.
Moving data around and backing it up are two different things. Oh, and so is 'high availability" which is what RAID does. RAID is NOT a backup solution, it just allows you to keep working when 1 disk, and one disk only, and nothing else, fails. If your house / PSU / controller burns, if you get burglarized... you STILL loose everything. RAID IS NOT BACKUP.
Plus, in my experience, RAID doesn't work very well, because data gets corrupted, the controller fails, your PSU fries and all the disks go... Don't trust raid.
So:
- for backups, have en extra USB or FW disk 3"1/2, that you connect from time to time to do backups of everything (hopefully several if you have enough room on it, that depends on which files you work on, count $150 for 200gigs+enclosure). Also burn a weekly DVD with your most important files (mail, photos, work documents, anything you CANNOT replace, NOT your porn+MP3 stash), and spread them around offsite (family, friends...). Maybe your ISP gives you some space for personal pages, which you can use for a second backup instead.
- for mobility, use email, FTP, USB sticks, a 2"1/2 external PSU-less HD, whichever suit your needs / capacity requirements.
There are quite a few solutions for quickly synching 2 drives, I use xxcopy (www.xxcopy.com) because I'm old school, MS has a new Synctool that I haven't tested, there are a lot more, those are free. Linux has a nifty rsynch command, but I don't know Linux.
And then you need the discipline to actually DO those backups;-)
- answers are added at the bottom of the mails. That may be standards-compliant, it's just not people-compliant, nobody does that, it's very confusing (people don't see my answers)
- I never found out how i can move mails from one server to another (I receive most mails on a POP server, but then archive the important ones on an IMAP server). That's a deal-breaker to me.
- I found the fact that all incoming mails show up in the same inbox confusing. I have several adresses for a reason (pro, perso, junk...). I tried to use filters to re-segregate unread mails by origin, but couldn't get it to work.
- I don't have a problem with everybody else's (MSO, MSOE, Tbird) search fonctions. I understand where filters can be handy, but even my 1.5-gig mailstore doesn't justify them. I have less than 100 "active" mails at any time, a classic search suffices for these, and for the occasional foray into archived mails.
- The interface is confusing, I don't understand why some stuff is in the menus, some in the panel (which I hate, eats up screen real estate)
- I didn't find any strong point that overcomes these shortcomings. "Quick reply" is kinda nice, but nor that much quicker than hitting the reply button, or ctrl+r;-)
- I certainly didn't try it for 2 months, I commend you for sticking it out that long while you hated it. I gave up after 5 days, as will most people.
It's safe to assume he's talking about entreprise PCs, since Sun really isn't in the home segment.
He has a point because most stuff companies do on regular PCs can be done just a well on NetPCs: - Mail - Web - Office Apps - Filling / querying databases, which most vertical "business" apps are, is not bandwidth-intensive, nor CPU bound.
Having NetPCs saves a lot of trouble - Everyone's stuff is accessible from any station - Users cannot mess up their configs, lose their data... - Security and confidentiality are better I'm amazed at how much support a basic user (mail, web, Office, couple of databases) requires from the IT staff.
But... - Some users will still need PCs on the go, and the Internet is neither available everywhere, nor fast enough everywhere it IS available - Some apps run much better on a PC (CAE/CAD...) - Users will grumble endlessly if you take away their MP3s, games... - I'm not sure the setup he advocates is more reliable than networked PCs, because any server or network issue brings everyone down - Entreprise apps (SAP...) are not quite good enough in their web incarnation, when they have Web versions
So PCs + "Web services" may be a nice transition step. You have to support both modes at the beginning, and then you gradually phase out PCs where they are not required. And start buying lots of Sun servers and NetStations.
I'm not convinced, just trying to understand his message.
I get flamed a lot for complaining regularly about failing to get linux to run on my PCs, but you've got me beat, i've never put 60 hours into it. I have trouble wrapping my mind around the idea of toiling 60 hours to set up a PVR !
I think the flat price has the great advantage of making me think not about saving a couple of bucks, but of which movie I really want to see. If prices were different, I would feel cheap going to a cheap movie, or wasteful going to an expensive one, or wonder what my date will think...
Chile was for a time the closest example of a working market economy in an authoritarian state, but now they are a democracy, too. There are NOT a lot of other examples.
I think the issue is that one of the most important prerequisites for a successful market economy is strong property rights, and the men in power in authoritarian countries tend to grab most eveything regardless of the law, when they bother to create / really enforce laws.
1- burned CDs and DVDs do NOT have a very long lifespan (some company in germany guarantees theirs for 100 years, but I'd guess most are chemically stable 10-20 years, and subject to scratching)
2- physical formats evolve. I recently came across 5"1/4 disks with all my grad. student stuff on them (that was wayyyy back in the 90s)... Assuming the data is still readable, it won't be easy to get the right drive. I could say that I don't care, but for my 30th BDay my sister exhumated my first writing exercises from school... It DID bring tears to my eyes.
3- logical formats evolve. MP3, JPEG and.DOC are prolly as time-safe as WordStar and 123 were back then (I'm pretty sure I can still import that into Office), but I doubt that 50 years on, those formats will still be popular. A case in point is mailstores, whose format I really don't trust over the long term.
So, same as you, I keep ALL my documents on a HD, mirror it every week to another HD, and burn DVDs every month or so (which I then store at friends') in case of a major disaster (fire...).
That doesn't work for "media" files (films, MP3s...), that take up too much space, but just for my office files, mail (and any other documents I create myself), and photos.
So, there will be no equivalent to grandma's old musty books, letters, and notebooks for our grandchildren (or toys for that matter, I doubt a gameboy will last 50 years). That's a BIG change.
On the other hand, will be able to IM with them, phone them, teleconf them..., which beats a monthly visit. Maybe we'll still be able to watch Star Wars and Princess Bride together ?
Slashdot Mirror
on iTunes, you can get crappy compressed music, fully DRMed. For the same price you can get a full-quality CD, and rip it to whatever you like. Still, people love iTunes... and now iTVSeries.
Why should it be different/cheaper for iBooks ?
Gmail complains about Opera but lets me use it, and I found no incompatibilities. Yahoo Mail Beta won't let me log in with Opera, so I'm still on the old, HTML-based system.
I'm still using mainly Yahoo, though. I love their spam filter, which catches all but 1 of the 60+ spams I get per day, and only flags 1 or 2 false positives per month.
I've played aroung with Gmail, but didn't see anything worth the trouble of changing my official email address. I'va also played around with Yahoo mail v2 via Firefox. Apart from the fact that I prefer Opera and think it's a waste to run 2 browsers, and didn't really see any reason to drop yahoo mail v1 either. The new interface is very outlook express-like, but for me it doesn't really work any better than the old one.
I'm wondering if I'm missing something here, since I like Yahoo's original, several years old interface, as much if not more the the new and imporved interfaces of Gmail and Yahoo v2. As long as I have good spam filters and nicknames, I'm happy.
Come on... dumb bitches totally make my day. Like the Hilton one. But please, no more than 30 seconds at a time, once a week ;-)
FLAC allows you to actually enjoy your music on your expensive stereo ;-)
learning ?
because making & maintaining computers + creating & translating software is sure to be a LOT more expensive than custom-designing one book per school year, both to set-up and to operate.
and the last study I saw, admittedly a long while back, showed that computer-aided learning was worse than book-and-paper learning. Do computers actually impair learning ?
Or at least give it lots of band aids, it has been terribly abused recently.
GNU/Open anyone ?
- it's smaller, lighter, faster than Firefox, and just as safe and compatible ;-)
;-) ) .
- mouse gestures are included in the standard install
- there are slightly less frequent updates/bugfixes to download for the core program, and since I don't use any plugins (again, mouse gestures are standard), a LOT fewer plugin updates
- I think Firefox does not have "sessions" (a bunch of URLs and their associated histories), that I can load automatically at startup, or at any time thereafter. I use that a lot: when i launch Opera on my main pc, it automatically opens My Yahoo, my 2 main mail accounts, and Slashdot. For when I go shopping for computer parts, I have a session with my favorite shops and review sites...
- I like Opera's download manager better, but that's mainly aesthetics/ergonomics, not functionnality.
- I'm soooo used to typing F2 + "g dodo bird" when I want to google about the dodo.
Then again, I started using Opera almost as soon as it came out on Windows, 7+ years ago, so I'm set in my ways now (and I paid for it
Let me return the question: apart from the quite valid philosophical one of Free Software being A Good Thing (tm), is there any reason to switch to Firefox ? I have it installed on several PCs, but I see no reason to switch over to it.
The one thing I don't like about Opera is that, if a fatal problem ( OS crash, network crash, other App fatal crash - note that Opera almost never crashes - ) occurs when you JUST opened a page (before a single byte of it has been downloaded), Opera loses track of that page, and opens a blank page instead with no URL. All the other, fully- or partially-downloaded pages, automatically reload when you re-start Opera.
Best Reagrds, Olivier
...and I'm in Sales.
:-/
I was an independent consultant at the time, and my departure was a long time coming, it took noone by surprise. On the day it was formally announced, I got locked out of all computer systems.
I found that both insulting and stupid.
Insulting, because a) I'm not a thief nor a sabotager, and I had hoped that after working together for over a year, Management had at least got that b) if I were, I'm intelligent enough to do my damage before, not after, my departure was announced. Management missed that, too
Stupid, because I fully intended to keep working during my notice, and they wanted me to, only with no access to the databases, I couldn't really work.
So, it hurt my feelings a fair deal, more so because it was a very small (10 person) company, and there was no SOP for departures.
They were the unprofessional ones. I tried to remain professional even after their antics. I shut out my direct boss 'coz I was soooo pissed with her, and wrapped everything up with her boss. I even managed to not badmouth my boss, which I was itching to do.
If I were to do it again, I'll try to speak with my boss and the head honcho a bit more, right before officially quitting, so they could feel more confident of my state of mind, and we could work out something for the notice's duration. i think doing it before rather than right after is important psychologically. I don't mind being payed for doing nothing, though.
I think the issue is not really the actual professional people looking for anti-terrorism data but the possible personnal and political misuse of that data. Longer-term, it does make witch hunts and Mc Carthyism easier, but I've faith that such things are behind us for a while. On the personal side, we've had problems in France such as a judge (or cop) gathering data off the police/terrorist databases for his masonic lodge... On the political side, president Miterrand put phone taps on famous actresses (and of course journalists and political opponents ;-) ).
:-/. Plus, cops and very conservative politicians are way too chummy for my taste.
I think the privacy issue is important, but looking at the US from the outside, what worries me most, apart from success of irrational discourse such as linking 9/11 and Iraq, is the ability to incarcerate almost anyone without due process, and to threaten anyone with that until they agree / confess / do anything they want you to do. That might be necessary, but what strikes me is the total lack of, at least, some feedback, evaluation, or clear responsability chain. Not even with a 1, 2 or 5 years delay to allow the antiterrorist people to do their job. Basically, cops have a free rein, and there won't be any paybacks ever if they misuse their powers. I know a few cops, and knowing they have all this power is NOT a reassuring prospect. Cops are rarely college graduates
I'm actually a bit scared of going to the US. Are they tracking my slashdot posts ? Will I show up in some kind of database ? What if a cop decides to harass me because I'm French ?
Mmmm, this is NOT a terrorist attack, which only requires a handful of people, but a lot of money and organization. It's riots, which require little money, but a lot of people.
... by volume. In poor markets, LCDs are still to expensive for doing the same job, less well, their only advantage is that they take up less space and look cool. In richer markets, people are starting to realize that CRTs' image quality is better. I don't know how fast LCD technology will progress, but i'm guessing CRTs will prove a bit more resilient than most people expect. So I'm not sure it's a smart move for Sony, especially since their Trinitron screens are quite good, though not the only game in town anymore.
What also bothers me about Sony is that they fancy themselves a high-end brand, but I had a couple of discmans fail right out of the box, sent each 3 times for service, they came back as broken as they went (so quality AND quality control AND service suck). Luckily, my retailer let me exchange them for another brand. I wrote to Sony, got a started "too bad" customer service letter.
Maybe they'll come out of their memory stick delusion sometime too... many people I talk to won't buy Sony stuff because of these. I know I won't.
Their latest phones, notebooks and digital cameras seem fine, though.
While in pinciple I fully agree that it's wrong to deny a drug for costs reason, I'm wondering where the limit is. Drugs save lives (well, the right one at the right time). Should they then all be free ? In every country ? For everyone ? Then we need to nationalize drugmaking... I can't wait for all the innovation that'll ensue.
Maybe there should be some kind of balance, depending on disease severity, cost, maybe a stadard price for emergency cases...
All of which is not discussed here... I'm really wondering what you guys are basing your opinions on.
... in other news, it has recently been discovered that pen and paper have been used to plan several terrorist attacks. A law to ban them is currently being drafted.
While I like in theory the ability to download music, TV episodes, and other media off of the internet for a negligible price, I take exception to getting it in a low-quality format.
:-)
Currently, I'm ripping my CDs to FLAC for use on my stereo, and to MP3 or WMA for my MP3 player. I've tried several formats, and any lossy format just sounds bad on my stereo. So I won't be buying any AAC files from ITMS: it costs about the same as a regular CD, but offers a lower sound quality, and is heavily DRMed on top of it, and you're forced to use iTunes.
Same goes for the videos/TV shows/films: I can buy DVDs, and rip them to any format (for my Palm Tungsten, motorola e398...), and still enjoy the best video and sound quality by watching the original DVD. $2 is not expensive for a TV show, but it IS expensive for a TV show you can only watch on a minuscule screen, at a very low resolution. If I'm shelling out $2 for a show, I want it up on my big screen. There's enough good, old stuff around that I have yet to see, so I can wait for the DVDs to come out, and not rush to get a next-day fix.
I do like the iPod's hardware, though
If we should let such examples pass as actually nice (kill all the men, take the wives... but ONLY if they don't surrender) BECAUSE they are forward-thinking **for their times**, and not as the utterly abhorrent attitude we judge it to be today, that means that the stuff in the Bible is not absolute, but must be judged within the perspective of their times.
...
One can't help wondering what has been obsoleted, what hasn't, how outdated stuff should be adapted to today's circumstances, who does the apraising / adapting
If that were software, we would say it's time for a complete rewrite.
I don't really care who wins. And I don't see any reason to hurry and be amongst the bleeding edgers.
As a matter of fact, I'm not even quite sure who won DVD+R vs DVD-R ?
So I'll sit it out, it's gonna take a little while for the prices to be acceptable, and for recorders to come out, anyway.
Moving data around and backing it up are two different things. Oh, and so is 'high availability" which is what RAID does. RAID is NOT a backup solution, it just allows you to keep working when 1 disk, and one disk only, and nothing else, fails. If your house / PSU / controller burns, if you get burglarized... you STILL loose everything. RAID IS NOT BACKUP.
;-)
Plus, in my experience, RAID doesn't work very well, because data gets corrupted, the controller fails, your PSU fries and all the disks go... Don't trust raid.
So:
- for backups, have en extra USB or FW disk 3"1/2, that you connect from time to time to do backups of everything (hopefully several if you have enough room on it, that depends on which files you work on, count $150 for 200gigs+enclosure).
Also burn a weekly DVD with your most important files (mail, photos, work documents, anything you CANNOT replace, NOT your porn+MP3 stash), and spread them around offsite (family, friends...). Maybe your ISP gives you some space for personal pages, which you can use for a second backup instead.
- for mobility, use email, FTP, USB sticks, a 2"1/2 external PSU-less HD, whichever suit your needs / capacity requirements.
There are quite a few solutions for quickly synching 2 drives, I use xxcopy (www.xxcopy.com) because I'm old school, MS has a new Synctool that I haven't tested, there are a lot more, those are free. Linux has a nifty rsynch command, but I don't know Linux.
And then you need the discipline to actually DO those backups
I'm not kidding:
;-)
- answers are added at the bottom of the mails. That may be standards-compliant, it's just not people-compliant, nobody does that, it's very confusing (people don't see my answers)
- I never found out how i can move mails from one server to another (I receive most mails on a POP server, but then archive the important ones on an IMAP server). That's a deal-breaker to me.
- I found the fact that all incoming mails show up in the same inbox confusing. I have several adresses for a reason (pro, perso, junk...). I tried to use filters to re-segregate unread mails by origin, but couldn't get it to work.
- I don't have a problem with everybody else's (MSO, MSOE, Tbird) search fonctions. I understand where filters can be handy, but even my 1.5-gig mailstore doesn't justify them. I have less than 100 "active" mails at any time, a classic search suffices for these, and for the occasional foray into archived mails.
- The interface is confusing, I don't understand why some stuff is in the menus, some in the panel (which I hate, eats up screen real estate)
- I didn't find any strong point that overcomes these shortcomings. "Quick reply" is kinda nice, but nor that much quicker than hitting the reply button, or ctrl+r
- I certainly didn't try it for 2 months, I commend you for sticking it out that long while you hated it. I gave up after 5 days, as will most people.
It's safe to assume he's talking about entreprise PCs, since Sun really isn't in the home segment.
...
He has a point because most stuff companies do on regular PCs can be done just a well on NetPCs:
- Mail
- Web
- Office Apps
- Filling / querying databases, which most vertical "business" apps are,
is not bandwidth-intensive, nor CPU bound.
Having NetPCs saves a lot of trouble
- Everyone's stuff is accessible from any station
- Users cannot mess up their configs, lose their data...
- Security and confidentiality are better
I'm amazed at how much support a basic user (mail, web, Office, couple of databases) requires from the IT staff.
But
- Some users will still need PCs on the go, and the Internet is neither available everywhere, nor fast enough everywhere it IS available
- Some apps run much better on a PC (CAE/CAD...)
- Users will grumble endlessly if you take away their MP3s, games...
- I'm not sure the setup he advocates is more reliable than networked PCs, because any server or network issue brings everyone down
- Entreprise apps (SAP...) are not quite good enough in their web incarnation, when they have Web versions
So PCs + "Web services" may be a nice transition step. You have to support both modes at the beginning, and then you gradually phase out PCs where they are not required. And start buying lots of Sun servers and NetStations.
I'm not convinced, just trying to understand his message.
Mmmmmm, isn't the definition of user-friendly that you don't have to learn it, because it's self-explanatory ?
I get flamed a lot for complaining regularly about failing to get linux to run on my PCs, but you've got me beat, i've never put 60 hours into it. I have trouble wrapping my mind around the idea of toiling 60 hours to set up a PVR !
I think the flat price has the great advantage of making me think not about saving a couple of bucks, but of which movie I really want to see. If prices were different, I would feel cheap going to a cheap movie, or wasteful going to an expensive one, or wonder what my date will think ...
Chile was for a time the closest example of a working market economy in an authoritarian state, but now they are a democracy, too. There are NOT a lot of other examples.
I think the issue is that one of the most important prerequisites for a successful market economy is strong property rights, and the men in power in authoritarian countries tend to grab most eveything regardless of the law, when they bother to create / really enforce laws.
This list just got totally discredited...
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088591/
1- burned CDs and DVDs do NOT have a very long lifespan (some company in germany guarantees theirs for 100 years, but I'd guess most are chemically stable 10-20 years, and subject to scratching)
.DOC are prolly as time-safe as WordStar and 123 were back then (I'm pretty sure I can still import that into Office), but I doubt that 50 years on, those formats will still be popular. A case in point is mailstores, whose format I really don't trust over the long term.
2- physical formats evolve. I recently came across 5"1/4 disks with all my grad. student stuff on them (that was wayyyy back in the 90s)... Assuming the data is still readable, it won't be easy to get the right drive. I could say that I don't care, but for my 30th BDay my sister exhumated my first writing exercises from school... It DID bring tears to my eyes.
3- logical formats evolve. MP3, JPEG and
So, same as you, I keep ALL my documents on a HD, mirror it every week to another HD, and burn DVDs every month or so (which I then store at friends') in case of a major disaster (fire...).
That doesn't work for "media" files (films, MP3s...), that take up too much space, but just for my office files, mail (and any other documents I create myself), and photos.
So, there will be no equivalent to grandma's old musty books, letters, and notebooks for our grandchildren (or toys for that matter, I doubt a gameboy will last 50 years). That's a BIG change.
On the other hand, will be able to IM with them, phone them, teleconf them..., which beats a monthly visit. Maybe we'll still be able to watch Star Wars and Princess Bride together ?