I think people forget that at the time of Galileo, the Church was preparing to tell people that the Earth orbited the Sun (mostly because scientific calculations showed that it was easier to calculate the movements of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn in the night sky by showing the Earth orbiting the Sun) but Galileo "jumped the gun" in espousing the heliocentric view of the universe, which didn't go down well with Church authorities.
Today, with modern astronomical instruments on the ground and in space, the finding of planets orbiting nearby stars show means everyone must "adjust" to the view that we are not alone in the universe. In fact, it would not surprise me at all that lifeforms on rocky crust planets orbiting stars that are within 100 light years of our Sun at least evolved to fairly advanced animal lifeforms--whether it is human-level intelligence is open to debate, though.
Sorry, but I'm not ditching cable TV for the Internet for two reasons:
1) Real cable TV can transmit a large number of real HDTV channels at 1080i or 720p resolution with only very occasional issues with stuttering and loss of signal. I've never seen it work well at resolutions beyond 480p on Internet Protocol TV transmissions unless you have a Verizon FIOS fiber optic or Comcast cable Internet subscription with its above 10 mbps sustained download speeds.
2) Because ISP's are imposing download caps, you can forget about downloading TV shows at high resolution through an Internet connection if you want to download a lot of shows.
What killed the network interface card market was the fact that almost every new motherboard built in the last 6-7 years at minimum sport a 100Base-T Ethernet port (most of the latest motherboards now have 1000Base-T Gigabit Ethernet ports).
But the problem with China is they're still at least a decade away from building a rocket big enough to carry a sizable probe to Mars. Meanwhile, the US can do it with the Atlas V rocket or Delta IV Heavy rocket, Russia can do with the latest Proton rocket, and the Europeans can do it with the Ariane V rocket.
If it weren't for Frederic Wertham's book The Seduction of the Innocent, I think the American comics industry would have continued to grow and companies like Marvel and DC would have started to branch out into more "adult" comics by the middle to late 1960's. And it would have been only just behind Japan and the French-speaking countries in terms of level of readership.
During the height of the Dragonball craze, Shuiesha's Shounen Jump anthology in Japan would get around nearly seven million readers per week--a truly unfathomable level of readership that will never be surpassed.
Actually, most people have moved on beyond IE 6.01 SP1 for one good reason: tabular browsing. In fact, a lot of corporate users have switched over to IE 7.0 because of its ability to do tabbed browsing, not to mention much improved security over IE 6.01 SP1.
And with Windows Vista and Windows 7, users are running IE 8.0, which is actually quite good, if a tad slow in some page layout rendering.
Question: how much RAM came with your computer? If you had less than 3 GB of RAM, Windows Vista would have run poorly even in 32-bit mode. On my HP Pavilion a6400f, since it has 3 GB of RAM, it runs well even with the Aero Glass theme running.
Windows 7, on the other hand, has much more code optimization, so even with 2 GB of RAM the system runs reasonably fast in 32-bit mode with the full Aero Glass interface running. Your "older" machine with 2 GB of RAM--provided your graphics car supports DirectX 9.0--should be able to run Windows 7 with no problems.
But unlike Windows 7, at the time Windows Vista came it the OS was just TOO advanced for the commonly hardware available at the time. It wasn't until early 2008 with the wide-availability of dual-core CPU machines that the Windows Vista performance issues finally started to go away, spurred on further by the release of Service Pack 1, which corrected a lot of memory management issues.
In contrast, Windows 7 comes at a time when the average "mainstream" desktop or laptop computer sported dual-core CPU's. As such, we don't have serious performance issues, and "fresh" installations on machines built within the last two years works very well indeed.
Usually, if I have to do a major OS upgrade, I just back up user data, then erase the drive and do a completely fresh install. That way, it is essentially a new installation without having to deal with the legacy code from a previous OS installation.
Having played with Windows 7 Build 7000 (public beta), Build 7100 (RC1) and the final version, Windows 7 is stable enough as is to not need to wait for a Service Pack 1. The only thing we need are proper Windows 7 drivers, which will be coming over the next 4-5 months from hardware manufacturers that haven't gotten them available yet at the time of Windows 7's retail release.
When SP1 comes out (which I expect will arrive probably Summer 2010), I expect to be a "roll up" of the monthly security fixes plus additional driver support. This isn't like SP1 of Windows Vista, which had a LOT of bug fixes to correct a number of memory handling issues.
What I find fascinating about the decline of newspapers comes from the fact well-known futurist and author Alvin Toffler warned about this very thing happening nearly 30 years ago in perhaps his most famous book, The Third Wave.
I suggest you pick up a copy and read the shockingly prophetic chapter, "De-Massifying the Media." Toffler wrote that with improving communication technologies, the days of mass media companies having a hammerlock on news distribution will come to an end. Since this book's publication in 1980, the rise of first proprietary online services in the 1980's and the public Internet in the 1990's allowed an end-run of news reporting around the mass media companies, and today we can can news in real time sent even to "smart" cellphones like a Blackberry or iPhone--including real-time video! And the public Internet has made it possible for the rise in citizen journalism--the so-called "pajamas media" as some pundits call it.Finally, the rise of eBay and Craigslist has effectively killed a huge fraction of newspaper revenue--classified advertising.
With cheap laptop computers (you can get a decently-equipped Windows 7 full laptop computer for around US$500-US$600) equipped with 801.11b/g/n connectivity, small wonder why people are getting their news from a computer nowadays, not from reading the paper delivered once a day or watching the once-a-day even network news broadcast.
Apple's much-rumored tablet computer could be perhaps the last hope for newspaper organizations--you will get highly-formatted digital versions of newspapers automatically delivered to this computer either by 3G cellular wireless or Wi-Fi to be read when you wake up in the morning.
I agree 100%. Why do you think many describe a number of environmental groups as watermelons--green on the outside (they want to save the environment) but red on the inside (it's an excuse to destroy capitalism).
Mind you, the history of environmentalism in Leftist countries is a sordid one, as noted by the innumerable toxic waste sites in the former Soviet Union and the huge pollution problems in China now....
I think the plaintiff better read the famous cases against the United Shoe Machinery Company by the US government, where the Feds found United Shoe of abusing patent laws to exert its monopoly power, with United Shoe using its patent portfolio to shut out competitors in terms of shoemaking machinery.
The US government could step in and say the plaintiff may have no case, since what the plaintiff wants is effectively a means of financial extortion against other companies.
If they can really cut the power consumption of DLP + laser rear projection TV's to really low levels, that could mean a revival of RPTV's for 55" and larger displays until OLED panels make it to the 55" range.
That's why I said in the original message that the companies I mentioned are going to spend billions of dollars to overcome the technical issues hampering larger-size OLED displays and get them into production by 2012.
Alas, on an older netbook you lose the Aero Glass interface in Windows 7--it essentially runs like the Starter Edition.
But by late spring 2010, netbooks will use the Intel Atom N450 CPU with the "Pine Trail" chipset, and it's possible by then netbooks could sport as much as 4 GB of RAM. In that case, a netbook will run the full version of Windows 7 Home Premium in 64-bit mode, complete with Aero Glass interface!:-)
I think this new law could fast-track the development of larger OLED flat panel TV's.
Since OLED's don't need backlighting, by definition it means very efficient power usage even on flat panel TV's over 50" in size. Don't be surprised that LG, Samsung, Panasonic and Sony start pouring in billions of dollars in R&D to overcome the current technical issues and get these larger OLED flat panel TV's into production by 2012 at latest. And unlike LCD TVs, OLED TVs will have extremely fast response times, which means no motion blurring issues even with fast action scenes.
However, the very fact Windows 7 recovers from program crashes far more gracefully than in Windows XP is good reason to switch. When you have a crash in XP that involves explore.exe, all heck can break loose; that same crash in Windows 7 only causes a graceful shutdown of the offending application.
One big advantage of Windows 7 over Windows XP: if you have a program crash, Windows 7 has VASTLY more graceful recovery, since it uses the same crash protection that Windows Vista uses.
I myself like Windows 7--it runs very well even on a machine with 2 GB of RAM, and some of the interface improvements are actually quite good.
I should note that what I wrote also applies to the latest versions of commercial Internet security products from Grisoft, Kaspersky, McAfee, Panda Software and Trend Micro, and ZoneAlarm, all of which should automatically update itself on the Internet to keep ahead of the latest threats.
Keep the security software on your Windows PC up to date.
That's why I have a subscription to Norton Internet Security, and I was able to download and install Norton Internet Security 2010 for free. NIS 2010 constantly tracks and stops all the major types of malware (viruses, worms, spyware and keyloggers) and also includes monitoring to stop you from entering known malware and phishing sites. And NIS 2010 constantly updates itself with the latest malware definitions if you're connected to the Internet.
Also, look at how you configure your home network router. It's possible that with proper configuration, you can stop a LOT of these malware attacks before it is stopped by a Internet security program.
Cloud computing makes sense for email and for off-site critical backup of your most important files.
But if you do a lot of sophisticated work at your computer, it's best to have locallized storage because access to data is a LOT faster and you don't have to worry about if the Internet suddenly goes down, losing acces to your data "in the cloud."
I'd agree with IE 6.01 SP1 but the IE 8.0 that comes with Windows 7 does a reasonably commendable job of security with the SmartScreen filtering system. And IE 8.0 defaults to standards-compliant mode for everything except HTML 5. And I expect Microsoft to offer an upgrade to IE 8.0 to support HTML 5, especially necessary to run things like Google Wave.
Actually, I'll install Firefox 3.5.3, NOT Opera 10. The reason is simple: Firefox renders the vast majority of web pages out there more accurately than Opera 10 but supports the latest web standards such as HTML 5. Not to mention the huge amount of extensions and themes available for Firefox, which drastically increases the flexibility of customization for end users.
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I think people forget that at the time of Galileo, the Church was preparing to tell people that the Earth orbited the Sun (mostly because scientific calculations showed that it was easier to calculate the movements of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn in the night sky by showing the Earth orbiting the Sun) but Galileo "jumped the gun" in espousing the heliocentric view of the universe, which didn't go down well with Church authorities.
Today, with modern astronomical instruments on the ground and in space, the finding of planets orbiting nearby stars show means everyone must "adjust" to the view that we are not alone in the universe. In fact, it would not surprise me at all that lifeforms on rocky crust planets orbiting stars that are within 100 light years of our Sun at least evolved to fairly advanced animal lifeforms--whether it is human-level intelligence is open to debate, though.
Sorry, but I'm not ditching cable TV for the Internet for two reasons:
1) Real cable TV can transmit a large number of real HDTV channels at 1080i or 720p resolution with only very occasional issues with stuttering and loss of signal. I've never seen it work well at resolutions beyond 480p on Internet Protocol TV transmissions unless you have a Verizon FIOS fiber optic or Comcast cable Internet subscription with its above 10 mbps sustained download speeds.
2) Because ISP's are imposing download caps, you can forget about downloading TV shows at high resolution through an Internet connection if you want to download a lot of shows.
What killed the network interface card market was the fact that almost every new motherboard built in the last 6-7 years at minimum sport a 100Base-T Ethernet port (most of the latest motherboards now have 1000Base-T Gigabit Ethernet ports).
But the problem with China is they're still at least a decade away from building a rocket big enough to carry a sizable probe to Mars. Meanwhile, the US can do it with the Atlas V rocket or Delta IV Heavy rocket, Russia can do with the latest Proton rocket, and the Europeans can do it with the Ariane V rocket.
If it weren't for Frederic Wertham's book The Seduction of the Innocent, I think the American comics industry would have continued to grow and companies like Marvel and DC would have started to branch out into more "adult" comics by the middle to late 1960's. And it would have been only just behind Japan and the French-speaking countries in terms of level of readership.
During the height of the Dragonball craze, Shuiesha's Shounen Jump anthology in Japan would get around nearly seven million readers per week--a truly unfathomable level of readership that will never be surpassed.
Actually, most people have moved on beyond IE 6.01 SP1 for one good reason: tabular browsing. In fact, a lot of corporate users have switched over to IE 7.0 because of its ability to do tabbed browsing, not to mention much improved security over IE 6.01 SP1.
And with Windows Vista and Windows 7, users are running IE 8.0, which is actually quite good, if a tad slow in some page layout rendering.
Question: how much RAM came with your computer? If you had less than 3 GB of RAM, Windows Vista would have run poorly even in 32-bit mode. On my HP Pavilion a6400f, since it has 3 GB of RAM, it runs well even with the Aero Glass theme running.
Windows 7, on the other hand, has much more code optimization, so even with 2 GB of RAM the system runs reasonably fast in 32-bit mode with the full Aero Glass interface running. Your "older" machine with 2 GB of RAM--provided your graphics car supports DirectX 9.0--should be able to run Windows 7 with no problems.
But unlike Windows 7, at the time Windows Vista came it the OS was just TOO advanced for the commonly hardware available at the time. It wasn't until early 2008 with the wide-availability of dual-core CPU machines that the Windows Vista performance issues finally started to go away, spurred on further by the release of Service Pack 1, which corrected a lot of memory management issues.
In contrast, Windows 7 comes at a time when the average "mainstream" desktop or laptop computer sported dual-core CPU's. As such, we don't have serious performance issues, and "fresh" installations on machines built within the last two years works very well indeed.
Usually, if I have to do a major OS upgrade, I just back up user data, then erase the drive and do a completely fresh install. That way, it is essentially a new installation without having to deal with the legacy code from a previous OS installation.
Having played with Windows 7 Build 7000 (public beta), Build 7100 (RC1) and the final version, Windows 7 is stable enough as is to not need to wait for a Service Pack 1. The only thing we need are proper Windows 7 drivers, which will be coming over the next 4-5 months from hardware manufacturers that haven't gotten them available yet at the time of Windows 7's retail release.
When SP1 comes out (which I expect will arrive probably Summer 2010), I expect to be a "roll up" of the monthly security fixes plus additional driver support. This isn't like SP1 of Windows Vista, which had a LOT of bug fixes to correct a number of memory handling issues.
What I find fascinating about the decline of newspapers comes from the fact well-known futurist and author Alvin Toffler warned about this very thing happening nearly 30 years ago in perhaps his most famous book, The Third Wave.
I suggest you pick up a copy and read the shockingly prophetic chapter, "De-Massifying the Media." Toffler wrote that with improving communication technologies, the days of mass media companies having a hammerlock on news distribution will come to an end. Since this book's publication in 1980, the rise of first proprietary online services in the 1980's and the public Internet in the 1990's allowed an end-run of news reporting around the mass media companies, and today we can can news in real time sent even to "smart" cellphones like a Blackberry or iPhone--including real-time video! And the public Internet has made it possible for the rise in citizen journalism--the so-called "pajamas media" as some pundits call it.Finally, the rise of eBay and Craigslist has effectively killed a huge fraction of newspaper revenue--classified advertising.
With cheap laptop computers (you can get a decently-equipped Windows 7 full laptop computer for around US$500-US$600) equipped with 801.11b/g/n connectivity, small wonder why people are getting their news from a computer nowadays, not from reading the paper delivered once a day or watching the once-a-day even network news broadcast.
Apple's much-rumored tablet computer could be perhaps the last hope for newspaper organizations--you will get highly-formatted digital versions of newspapers automatically delivered to this computer either by 3G cellular wireless or Wi-Fi to be read when you wake up in the morning.
I agree 100%. Why do you think many describe a number of environmental groups as watermelons--green on the outside (they want to save the environment) but red on the inside (it's an excuse to destroy capitalism).
Mind you, the history of environmentalism in Leftist countries is a sordid one, as noted by the innumerable toxic waste sites in the former Soviet Union and the huge pollution problems in China now....
I think the plaintiff better read the famous cases against the United Shoe Machinery Company by the US government, where the Feds found United Shoe of abusing patent laws to exert its monopoly power, with United Shoe using its patent portfolio to shut out competitors in terms of shoemaking machinery.
The US government could step in and say the plaintiff may have no case, since what the plaintiff wants is effectively a means of financial extortion against other companies.
If they can really cut the power consumption of DLP + laser rear projection TV's to really low levels, that could mean a revival of RPTV's for 55" and larger displays until OLED panels make it to the 55" range.
That's why I said in the original message that the companies I mentioned are going to spend billions of dollars to overcome the technical issues hampering larger-size OLED displays and get them into production by 2012.
In fact, I've read potentially OLED panels will have better contrast than even plasma panels.
Alas, on an older netbook you lose the Aero Glass interface in Windows 7--it essentially runs like the Starter Edition.
But by late spring 2010, netbooks will use the Intel Atom N450 CPU with the "Pine Trail" chipset, and it's possible by then netbooks could sport as much as 4 GB of RAM. In that case, a netbook will run the full version of Windows 7 Home Premium in 64-bit mode, complete with Aero Glass interface! :-)
I think this new law could fast-track the development of larger OLED flat panel TV's.
Since OLED's don't need backlighting, by definition it means very efficient power usage even on flat panel TV's over 50" in size. Don't be surprised that LG, Samsung, Panasonic and Sony start pouring in billions of dollars in R&D to overcome the current technical issues and get these larger OLED flat panel TV's into production by 2012 at latest. And unlike LCD TVs, OLED TVs will have extremely fast response times, which means no motion blurring issues even with fast action scenes.
However, the very fact Windows 7 recovers from program crashes far more gracefully than in Windows XP is good reason to switch. When you have a crash in XP that involves explore.exe, all heck can break loose; that same crash in Windows 7 only causes a graceful shutdown of the offending application.
One big advantage of Windows 7 over Windows XP: if you have a program crash, Windows 7 has VASTLY more graceful recovery, since it uses the same crash protection that Windows Vista uses.
I myself like Windows 7--it runs very well even on a machine with 2 GB of RAM, and some of the interface improvements are actually quite good.
I should note that what I wrote also applies to the latest versions of commercial Internet security products from Grisoft, Kaspersky, McAfee, Panda Software and Trend Micro, and ZoneAlarm, all of which should automatically update itself on the Internet to keep ahead of the latest threats.
Keep the security software on your Windows PC up to date.
That's why I have a subscription to Norton Internet Security, and I was able to download and install Norton Internet Security 2010 for free. NIS 2010 constantly tracks and stops all the major types of malware (viruses, worms, spyware and keyloggers) and also includes monitoring to stop you from entering known malware and phishing sites. And NIS 2010 constantly updates itself with the latest malware definitions if you're connected to the Internet.
Also, look at how you configure your home network router. It's possible that with proper configuration, you can stop a LOT of these malware attacks before it is stopped by a Internet security program.
Cloud computing makes sense for email and for off-site critical backup of your most important files.
But if you do a lot of sophisticated work at your computer, it's best to have locallized storage because access to data is a LOT faster and you don't have to worry about if the Internet suddenly goes down, losing acces to your data "in the cloud."
I'd agree with IE 6.01 SP1 but the IE 8.0 that comes with Windows 7 does a reasonably commendable job of security with the SmartScreen filtering system. And IE 8.0 defaults to standards-compliant mode for everything except HTML 5. And I expect Microsoft to offer an upgrade to IE 8.0 to support HTML 5, especially necessary to run things like Google Wave.
Actually, I'll install Firefox 3.5.3, NOT Opera 10. The reason is simple: Firefox renders the vast majority of web pages out there more accurately than Opera 10 but supports the latest web standards such as HTML 5. Not to mention the huge amount of extensions and themes available for Firefox, which drastically increases the flexibility of customization for end users.