Driving them around on sandstone cliffs overlooking a fast flowing river does that. As sad as it is, it's definitely a contender for the Darwin Awards.
Can't see if this is mentioned anywhere, but IBM got out of the desktop business a few years ago if you recall. ThinkPads are made by Lenovo now, who are a completely different company, based in China. In addition, yes, AIX is moribund. IBM have abandoned that for z/OS on mainframes and SUSE everywhere else. I worked on a migration to an IBM datacentre a few years ago where, despite the original intention of virtualising SUSE on a z-Series mainframe, we ended with a bunch of p-Series servers running AIX. IBM couldn't even schedule a permanent member of staff to build the machines and had to get a contractor in to install their own OS on their own machines. Having said that, I knew someone at the time who had a PowerPC ThinkPad, which was a peculiar beast indeed. It ran AIX with CDE but even in 2004 it seemed like an anachronism with very few of the things you needed to make a desktop machine useful: I think OpenOffice 1 had been ported.
Actually, to be pedantic, the Fujitsu-Siemens that the government deals with is British - it's the stub of what used to be Ferranti, which is why they still have preferred supplier status.
It's entirely correct though. The national identity database project was only started after a study by Schlumberger-Sema (a US-French organisation and yet another IT supplier to uk.gov) confirmed that it was viable. The British government, both the elected and unelected part, seems remarkably naive when gathering advice on matters of IT policy, along the lines of 'do you, Fujitsu Siemens, providers of computer hardware, believe that we need to update (insert government department)'s IT infrastructure?'. The majority of EDS's UK income comes from its government business, despite frequent project overruns and outright failures, and yet it continues to gain work in the public sector. I'm sure it's no different in other countries but the UK seems to be more blatant about it.
Unfortunately, any new, commerce oriented version of the Internet would have those models built in from the beginning because of the people who would pay for it. It's not just Beijing or Tehran, but Washington, London, Coke, Disney, News International...
The Internet is probably going to be the first and only high frontier of communication that allowed unmanaged homesteading: radio and TV were licensed from very early in their existence. As the industry learned its lesson with new forms of media such as DVD and BluRay disks it would surely assert its influence on any attempt to create a new, 'improved' network.
I don't think the author of the original article is thinking in those terms though, and if he thought about it a bit, he'd see that the Internet wasn't 'done wrong' or we wouldn't still be building on it forty years after the basic principles were developed. Some of the things that we use it for now require more bandwidth than can comfortably be provided but that's a physical constraint, as are the limitations of connectivity, which are and will be addressed by IPv6, and which is a case of not if but when. Then and only then will his fridge be able to tweet when his milk is going off.
Business messaging is about the assured transfer of data using FTP or other transfer protocols, not email over SMTP or MAPI. It's done using queues and management systems to route, deliver and confirm that data has been delivered in a auditable way. Funnily enough it has more in common with instant messaging than it does with email.
On the subject of IM, you could do worse than find a decent but surplus PC, install VMWare Server on it and get a Jabber server appliance. Jabber and XMPP is an excellent alternative to MSN but can be a bit of a pig to set up, so a ready built appliance is a good way of testing it. Use Pidgin or Adium for OSX as the client.
The ad market isn't based on demand, it's based on what people are willing to pay, and these, in this case, are fundamentally different things. Yes, in the context that the article writer talks about, 'Flash' is a trademark, but 'flash photography' isn't, but it's specious to say that people aren't bidding for ads because they can't afford them, and it's also sheer speculation to say that Google is pricing specific words out of the market. I wouldn't claim to be an expert, but I have been involved in Adwords campaigns, particularly in narrowly targeted areas, and it's obvious that there's a correlation between the validity of a search term, and that search term's value as Adword keywords. This plugs Adwords into the whole Pagerank system, which will ultimately value words in accordance with what people are searching for at the time. Real names also have a high value, and it may be that 'Flash' is regarded differently to 'flash'. I have a client who sells garden furniture that is branded with the name of a popular UK TV gardening presenter. He's not the sole distributor, so he is in competition with other vendors selling those products, plus anything else that has the presenters' name on it. When we did the Adwords campaign he had just published another book and was appearing in a mainstream evening TV show, which ultimately lead to the minimum bid for using his name being set at £1.30 per impression. However, like any auction, this must have only been set because someone was willing to pay it in order to get their ads to the top and right ad bars on the first page of the search results. In that respect Adwords is essentially a mechanised trading system and there may be curbs and restraints, and I dare say the occasional artificial ceiling or trapdoor, to control excessive or combative bidding, but in theory, if you wanted to bid for 'Microsoft' to link it to a campaign for Linux, you would be bidding against anyone else who wanted to get 'Microsoft' into pole position, including Microsoft themselves, who have far more money to throw at ad impressions then you do (if they gave money to Google, but that's by the by). There probably are restraints within the system around using trademarks, which *probably* exist to prevent or limit messy and expensive lawsuits rather than pricing their availability out of the market. So the question is, will the bubble burst? If advertisers don't get a good return for their costs, by converting click-throughs to sales, which is what Google Analytics is for, and if people stop clicking on ads, which is the key measure for Google, then advertisers will consider taking their ad budget somewhere else, and income will degrade, but it's not a linear progression, as while it fails in one market, it will rise in another, probably debt management solutions. Advertising doesn't stop in hard times, but it finds more creative ways of making a return for its money, which is an unscientific process at best, so as long as Google can provide visible returns for its customers, which is after all far better than paper or broadcast media can provide, it will survive.
It's clearly someone who doesn't know what they're talking about. For one, FIC are not a Windows PC maker, but a PC maker. They make the ION 604 mini PC that is sold under various names, particularly Koolu and Linutop, which is sold either as a diskless thin client or with a 2.5" HD with a Linux distribution. It's based on the AMD Geode chip, and will run practically any x86 OS as long as there are drivers - I've put a standard out of the box Ubuntu distribution onto one which worked perfectly except for the sound (which was annoying as I was trying to make a networked music player). To say that OpenMoko is a 'Windows Mobile' phone is therefore specious. It's an ARM device that can run Windows Mobile or anything else that can be compiled for its chipset. HTC are about to follow suit and turn one of their models into an Android (read Linux and whatever the Android platform adds) phone. It has been possible, if not easy, to port Linux to their devices for a long time, but I think that that is the nature of the mobile phone/PDA platform in general. The question of compatibility with GPS and GSM hardware was discussed last year in various places. My feeling was that the nature of the mobile phone system would make it difficult for an 'open' telephone device to be truly open and that the best that could be done would be to talk to 'black box' implementations of GSM and maybe even GPS by squirting AT codes into sealed chipsets to prevent too much openness. Phone companies are notoriously protective about what crosses their networks, which was why I wondered aloud whether compromises would have to be made with OpenMoko. So far it would appear to be not, but it would also appear that there is going to be a fair amount of SIM-swapping and ongoing work to make it usable as a regular phone.
Tata will have agreed to the terms to get the business. Nielsen may well be disappointed at the actual execution. A seemingly common trend within Indian outsourcing companies seems to be the eagerness in which they will pitch for work without considering the implications of the requirement. I worked on a project a couple of years ago where one of the biggest Indian consultancies had undercut a major IT services company by 30% to get the contract, but then found that they needed hardware and expertise with it to get the job done, and consequently hired the IT services company to provide it. The attitude to manpower was also interesting: if for example they needed an Oracle DBA, the manager would call the HR department in Bangalore and say 'find me someone with Oracle on their CV', and someone would step off the plane a couple of days later. If they proved not to be up to scratch (quite rare, as most of the staff were at least good at one thing), they would be back on the plane fairly quickly. I don't think Nielsen will be losing out having such a clause in their contract, and Tata certainly don't see it as losing out, just the way they and the other major Indian consultancies run their business.
My regular bar has a very good video jukebox, which could really run anything as it's just pushing pixels to TV screens, but one day I saw it reboot and indeed it ran Windows 2000...
Indeed, but ten years ago you would have been using ISDN (or whatever the equivalent is in the US) in a point to point manner. In Soho in London even before then someone set up a localised IP network for exactly that purpose which could provide 2Mb/s if the studios were willing to pay for it. You'll still be able to shift data, just don't expect to do it over public networks.
The BBC Radio iPlayer is still RealPlayer at its heart although it also has a Windows Media version, and it's one of the biggest installations in the world, although their agreement must be up for renewal in the next year or so.
Apologies if this is obvious. The use of ethanol isn't about reducing the cost of gasoline to the consumer. For western governments it's about reducing dependency on external oil supplies, and in that respect it's something that is at least impossible to do, and at most incredibly dangerous. The model that everyone (including Cringely) points to is Brazil, which has had reasonable success in supplanting its oil supply with ethanol. China is being shown as a similar success story. However, what is rarely pointed out in pro-ethanol stories is that both Brazil and China are enormous countries with a surplus of arable land and relatively low car usage. Brazil in particular can build catalytic crackers in situ in land growing maize or sorghum, and no doubt the Chinese can do the same. There is also a low level tradition of ethanol distillation which is overlooked or taxed minimally by government in Brazil - backyard distillers are relatively common in rural parts of the country. Western countries don't have this capacity, and no doubt Big Oil will start a programme of building huge industrial distilleries in Iowa and on the Prussian plain, switching local economies from food crops to fuel crops, while the people of Des Moines import potatoes using the fuel that has replaced their staple business. The green arguments for this are thin and specious. The only real answer is to get away from our dependency on the internal combustion engine. This certainly won't happen tomorrow, but the power of the oil business and of the roads lobbies in most western countries means at the moment that it won't happen any time soon either, and if it doesn't, and governments keep selling the lie of environmental benefits, we could all be starving for our cars.
I have an OSD so I'm all for Neuros getting involved and bringing VLC to the platform, as it should fix a few of the shortcomings of the current video player, which out of the box won't play most QuickTime movs and streaming WMV files. However, I also get the feeling that VLC has been moribund for while: 1.0 was tentatively announced a couple of years ago yet there hasn't been an update from 0.8.6 for far longer, and there are bugs that have been unresolved for as long. I've started playing with media servers on my local network recently and I'm trying to put something together that works across my assorted Macs, Linux machines and TVs, and VLC seems to be potentially the best desktop player, but there are so many things that it doesn't do properly yet, such as stream discovery. It looks to me like Neuros et al are going to push development forward. It will remain be seen if their improvements and fixes find their way back into the current VLC source tree, not due to any attempt to restrict access to the code, but rather if there is the will from VLC's current developers.
I was involved in a hardware audit for BT last year and there was a PDP-10 registered in one of their datacentres. We've never actually found it but it wouldn't surprise me if it was there, still connected to the network and occasionally processing something. This is how BT's systems seem to work.
I've returned to Linux on desktop machines after a few years with OS X, mostly because I don't like the way that OS X is going - it's still possibly the best desktop Unix there will ever be, but I need a laptop, not a lifestyle accessory, I don't want to buy Starbucks Muzak, and Randy bleedin' Newman?.
So I'm typing this on a very nice Dell XPS M1330 running Ubuntu 7.10 (not the Dell distribution) and it's excellent: everything works except the fingerprint reader, and I am otherwise battling with a T-Mobile web n' walk USB stick that almost, but not quite works (there is documentation for it, but it's in French and Finnish: my French is schoolboy, my Finnish non-existent, and that's another problem).
I have been using Linux for getting on for 15 years, and yes, it is closer to being usable and more importantly supportable on the desktop than it has ever been, but when it comes to sorting out those esoteric problems, particularly with Ubuntu, I am finding few answers, just the same problems, or, worse still, workarounds that are being accepted as solutions that really wouldn't be acceptable to the casual user.
Here's an example: I am attached to my office network by a cheap wireless access point. My wireless card occasionally loses connection with it, but wpa_supplicant fails to reattach, and basically chews up the IP stack, resulting in needing to restart the machine, which won't close properly, and which leads to an fsck on reboot, which could potentially lose data. I would regard this as a fairly severe bug, but when I search on the Ubuntu forums I find someone with the same problems who believes that the response is to unload the wireless drivers from the kernel, kill wpa_supplicant and reload the drivers. This is an answer, but not a solution. The result is that issues still go unreported or unresolved, and they are issues that John Q Public can encounter, only to be faced with something utterly incomprehensible to them.
The Asus Eee, OLPC and other appliance devices are probably the best hope that Linux on the desktop has: like Apple, build for a known hardware configuration, make it work and support it. By all means Linux should run on all hardware, that is an important aim, but while there are still problems that can't be resolved from the GUI, it isn't going to get the sort of takeup that it deserves.
but how are they going to deliver the overpriced bottles of Coke and buckets of stale popcorn that they must make most of their profits on?
Seriously, this can't be efficient for them. They should just jump on AppleTV and give one away/cheap with an all you can eat sub for $300 a year. Otherwise a multiplicity of set top boxes will start competing for floor space with the games machines around people's TVs. Either that or they will have to provide their own bandwidth and then there will be a multiplicity of pipes into those set top boxes and games consoles.
I'd loosen the band on that tinfoil hat if I were you.
Governments don't need to be secret about these things: UK.gov, our wonderful ill-advised tech-obsessed leadership, has proposed universal road pricing in the past, which would require GPS/black box based tracking everywhere. Of course they were quick to point out that there would be no threat to privacy, but 18 months later the Metropolitan Police is requesting access to the records for the Oyster stored value travel card used by Transport for London to track people's movements, so in the end it can just be done in plain sight.
Our attitude to surveillance can be summed up by a frame in the original comic version of 'V for Vendetta' (not sure if it's in the film), where, after the security cameras have been disabled by V, a woman says that she misses them moving about as they felt familiar. That tinfoil might still come in handy.
Power6 is designed for servers so it's not likely. Had they been a year earlier to market we might have still not been running Windows on our G6 Powerbooks.
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Driving them around on sandstone cliffs overlooking a fast flowing river does that. As sad as it is, it's definitely a contender for the Darwin Awards.
Can't see if this is mentioned anywhere, but IBM got out of the desktop business a few years ago if you recall. ThinkPads are made by Lenovo now, who are a completely different company, based in China.
In addition, yes, AIX is moribund. IBM have abandoned that for z/OS on mainframes and SUSE everywhere else. I worked on a migration to an IBM datacentre a few years ago where, despite the original intention of virtualising SUSE on a z-Series mainframe, we ended with a bunch of p-Series servers running AIX. IBM couldn't even schedule a permanent member of staff to build the machines and had to get a contractor in to install their own OS on their own machines.
Having said that, I knew someone at the time who had a PowerPC ThinkPad, which was a peculiar beast indeed. It ran AIX with CDE but even in 2004 it seemed like an anachronism with very few of the things you needed to make a desktop machine useful: I think OpenOffice 1 had been ported.
Actually, to be pedantic, the Fujitsu-Siemens that the government deals with is British - it's the stub of what used to be Ferranti, which is why they still have preferred supplier status.
It's entirely correct though. The national identity database project was only started after a study by Schlumberger-Sema (a US-French organisation and yet another IT supplier to uk.gov) confirmed that it was viable. The British government, both the elected and unelected part, seems remarkably naive when gathering advice on matters of IT policy, along the lines of 'do you, Fujitsu Siemens, providers of computer hardware, believe that we need to update (insert government department)'s IT infrastructure?'. The majority of EDS's UK income comes from its government business, despite frequent project overruns and outright failures, and yet it continues to gain work in the public sector. I'm sure it's no different in other countries but the UK seems to be more blatant about it.
Other monolithic currencies are available, and indeed far closer.
Unfortunately, any new, commerce oriented version of the Internet would have those models built in from the beginning because of the people who would pay for it. It's not just Beijing or Tehran, but Washington, London, Coke, Disney, News International...
The Internet is probably going to be the first and only high frontier of communication that allowed unmanaged homesteading: radio and TV were licensed from very early in their existence. As the industry learned its lesson with new forms of media such as DVD and BluRay disks it would surely assert its influence on any attempt to create a new, 'improved' network.
I don't think the author of the original article is thinking in those terms though, and if he thought about it a bit, he'd see that the Internet wasn't 'done wrong' or we wouldn't still be building on it forty years after the basic principles were developed. Some of the things that we use it for now require more bandwidth than can comfortably be provided but that's a physical constraint, as are the limitations of connectivity, which are and will be addressed by IPv6, and which is a case of not if but when. Then and only then will his fridge be able to tweet when his milk is going off.
Business messaging is about the assured transfer of data using FTP or other transfer protocols, not email over SMTP or MAPI. It's done using queues and management systems to route, deliver and confirm that data has been delivered in a auditable way. Funnily enough it has more in common with instant messaging than it does with email.
On the subject of IM, you could do worse than find a decent but surplus PC, install VMWare Server on it and get a Jabber server appliance. Jabber and XMPP is an excellent alternative to MSN but can be a bit of a pig to set up, so a ready built appliance is a good way of testing it. Use Pidgin or Adium for OSX as the client.
The ad market isn't based on demand, it's based on what people are willing to pay, and these, in this case, are fundamentally different things. Yes, in the context that the article writer talks about, 'Flash' is a trademark, but 'flash photography' isn't, but it's specious to say that people aren't bidding for ads because they can't afford them, and it's also sheer speculation to say that Google is pricing specific words out of the market. I wouldn't claim to be an expert, but I have been involved in Adwords campaigns, particularly in narrowly targeted areas, and it's obvious that there's a correlation between the validity of a search term, and that search term's value as Adword keywords. This plugs Adwords into the whole Pagerank system, which will ultimately value words in accordance with what people are searching for at the time. Real names also have a high value, and it may be that 'Flash' is regarded differently to 'flash'.
I have a client who sells garden furniture that is branded with the name of a popular UK TV gardening presenter. He's not the sole distributor, so he is in competition with other vendors selling those products, plus anything else that has the presenters' name on it. When we did the Adwords campaign he had just published another book and was appearing in a mainstream evening TV show, which ultimately lead to the minimum bid for using his name being set at £1.30 per impression. However, like any auction, this must have only been set because someone was willing to pay it in order to get their ads to the top and right ad bars on the first page of the search results. In that respect Adwords is essentially a mechanised trading system and there may be curbs and restraints, and I dare say the occasional artificial ceiling or trapdoor, to control excessive or combative bidding, but in theory, if you wanted to bid for 'Microsoft' to link it to a campaign for Linux, you would be bidding against anyone else who wanted to get 'Microsoft' into pole position, including Microsoft themselves, who have far more money to throw at ad impressions then you do (if they gave money to Google, but that's by the by). There probably are restraints within the system around using trademarks, which *probably* exist to prevent or limit messy and expensive lawsuits rather than pricing their availability out of the market.
So the question is, will the bubble burst? If advertisers don't get a good return for their costs, by converting click-throughs to sales, which is what Google Analytics is for, and if people stop clicking on ads, which is the key measure for Google, then advertisers will consider taking their ad budget somewhere else, and income will degrade, but it's not a linear progression, as while it fails in one market, it will rise in another, probably debt management solutions. Advertising doesn't stop in hard times, but it finds more creative ways of making a return for its money, which is an unscientific process at best, so as long as Google can provide visible returns for its customers, which is after all far better than paper or broadcast media can provide, it will survive.
+1, anywhere in the world, including our grey little island in the North Sea.
It's clearly someone who doesn't know what they're talking about. For one, FIC are not a Windows PC maker, but a PC maker. They make the ION 604 mini PC that is sold under various names, particularly Koolu and Linutop, which is sold either as a diskless thin client or with a 2.5" HD with a Linux distribution. It's based on the AMD Geode chip, and will run practically any x86 OS as long as there are drivers - I've put a standard out of the box Ubuntu distribution onto one which worked perfectly except for the sound (which was annoying as I was trying to make a networked music player).
To say that OpenMoko is a 'Windows Mobile' phone is therefore specious. It's an ARM device that can run Windows Mobile or anything else that can be compiled for its chipset. HTC are about to follow suit and turn one of their models into an Android (read Linux and whatever the Android platform adds) phone. It has been possible, if not easy, to port Linux to their devices for a long time, but I think that that is the nature of the mobile phone/PDA platform in general.
The question of compatibility with GPS and GSM hardware was discussed last year in various places. My feeling was that the nature of the mobile phone system would make it difficult for an 'open' telephone device to be truly open and that the best that could be done would be to talk to 'black box' implementations of GSM and maybe even GPS by squirting AT codes into sealed chipsets to prevent too much openness. Phone companies are notoriously protective about what crosses their networks, which was why I wondered aloud whether compromises would have to be made with OpenMoko. So far it would appear to be not, but it would also appear that there is going to be a fair amount of SIM-swapping and ongoing work to make it usable as a regular phone.
Tata will have agreed to the terms to get the business. Nielsen may well be disappointed at the actual execution. A seemingly common trend within Indian outsourcing companies seems to be the eagerness in which they will pitch for work without considering the implications of the requirement. I worked on a project a couple of years ago where one of the biggest Indian consultancies had undercut a major IT services company by 30% to get the contract, but then found that they needed hardware and expertise with it to get the job done, and consequently hired the IT services company to provide it. The attitude to manpower was also interesting: if for example they needed an Oracle DBA, the manager would call the HR department in Bangalore and say 'find me someone with Oracle on their CV', and someone would step off the plane a couple of days later. If they proved not to be up to scratch (quite rare, as most of the staff were at least good at one thing), they would be back on the plane fairly quickly. I don't think Nielsen will be losing out having such a clause in their contract, and Tata certainly don't see it as losing out, just the way they and the other major Indian consultancies run their business.
My regular bar has a very good video jukebox, which could really run anything as it's just pushing pixels to TV screens, but one day I saw it reboot and indeed it ran Windows 2000...
Indeed, but ten years ago you would have been using ISDN (or whatever the equivalent is in the US) in a point to point manner. In Soho in London even before then someone set up a localised IP network for exactly that purpose which could provide 2Mb/s if the studios were willing to pay for it. You'll still be able to shift data, just don't expect to do it over public networks.
The BBC Radio iPlayer is still RealPlayer at its heart although it also has a Windows Media version, and it's one of the biggest installations in the world, although their agreement must be up for renewal in the next year or so.
Apologies if this is obvious. The use of ethanol isn't about reducing the cost of gasoline to the consumer. For western governments it's about reducing dependency on external oil supplies, and in that respect it's something that is at least impossible to do, and at most incredibly dangerous. The model that everyone (including Cringely) points to is Brazil, which has had reasonable success in supplanting its oil supply with ethanol. China is being shown as a similar success story. However, what is rarely pointed out in pro-ethanol stories is that both Brazil and China are enormous countries with a surplus of arable land and relatively low car usage. Brazil in particular can build catalytic crackers in situ in land growing maize or sorghum, and no doubt the Chinese can do the same. There is also a low level tradition of ethanol distillation which is overlooked or taxed minimally by government in Brazil - backyard distillers are relatively common in rural parts of the country.
Western countries don't have this capacity, and no doubt Big Oil will start a programme of building huge industrial distilleries in Iowa and on the Prussian plain, switching local economies from food crops to fuel crops, while the people of Des Moines import potatoes using the fuel that has replaced their staple business.
The green arguments for this are thin and specious. The only real answer is to get away from our dependency on the internal combustion engine. This certainly won't happen tomorrow, but the power of the oil business and of the roads lobbies in most western countries means at the moment that it won't happen any time soon either, and if it doesn't, and governments keep selling the lie of environmental benefits, we could all be starving for our cars.
and it's since transpired that most of it was fake. Taxis generally don't have CCTV in them. Yet.
There isn't the computing power in the world for that...
I have an OSD so I'm all for Neuros getting involved and bringing VLC to the platform, as it should fix a few of the shortcomings of the current video player, which out of the box won't play most QuickTime movs and streaming WMV files. However, I also get the feeling that VLC has been moribund for while: 1.0 was tentatively announced a couple of years ago yet there hasn't been an update from 0.8.6 for far longer, and there are bugs that have been unresolved for as long. I've started playing with media servers on my local network recently and I'm trying to put something together that works across my assorted Macs, Linux machines and TVs, and VLC seems to be potentially the best desktop player, but there are so many things that it doesn't do properly yet, such as stream discovery. It looks to me like Neuros et al are going to push development forward. It will remain be seen if their improvements and fixes find their way back into the current VLC source tree, not due to any attempt to restrict access to the code, but rather if there is the will from VLC's current developers.
There is one. It looks a lot prettier now than the original version I saw in the mid 90s, but the principles are the same.
They should have approached Nathan Myhrvold. He's got a Difference Engine now, I bet he'd love a Colossus.
Set one up as an LTSP server, and run the others as thin clients. Not for any reason, just because you can.
I was involved in a hardware audit for BT last year and there was a PDP-10 registered in one of their datacentres. We've never actually found it but it wouldn't surprise me if it was there, still connected to the network and occasionally processing something. This is how BT's systems seem to work.
So I'm typing this on a very nice Dell XPS M1330 running Ubuntu 7.10 (not the Dell distribution) and it's excellent: everything works except the fingerprint reader, and I am otherwise battling with a T-Mobile web n' walk USB stick that almost, but not quite works (there is documentation for it, but it's in French and Finnish: my French is schoolboy, my Finnish non-existent, and that's another problem). I have been using Linux for getting on for 15 years, and yes, it is closer to being usable and more importantly supportable on the desktop than it has ever been, but when it comes to sorting out those esoteric problems, particularly with Ubuntu, I am finding few answers, just the same problems, or, worse still, workarounds that are being accepted as solutions that really wouldn't be acceptable to the casual user.
Here's an example: I am attached to my office network by a cheap wireless access point. My wireless card occasionally loses connection with it, but wpa_supplicant fails to reattach, and basically chews up the IP stack, resulting in needing to restart the machine, which won't close properly, and which leads to an fsck on reboot, which could potentially lose data. I would regard this as a fairly severe bug, but when I search on the Ubuntu forums I find someone with the same problems who believes that the response is to unload the wireless drivers from the kernel, kill wpa_supplicant and reload the drivers. This is an answer, but not a solution. The result is that issues still go unreported or unresolved, and they are issues that John Q Public can encounter, only to be faced with something utterly incomprehensible to them.
The Asus Eee, OLPC and other appliance devices are probably the best hope that Linux on the desktop has: like Apple, build for a known hardware configuration, make it work and support it. By all means Linux should run on all hardware, that is an important aim, but while there are still problems that can't be resolved from the GUI, it isn't going to get the sort of takeup that it deserves.
but how are they going to deliver the overpriced bottles of Coke and buckets of stale popcorn that they must make most of their profits on?
Seriously, this can't be efficient for them. They should just jump on AppleTV and give one away/cheap with an all you can eat sub for $300 a year. Otherwise a multiplicity of set top boxes will start competing for floor space with the games machines around people's TVs. Either that or they will have to provide their own bandwidth and then there will be a multiplicity of pipes into those set top boxes and games consoles.
I'd loosen the band on that tinfoil hat if I were you.
Governments don't need to be secret about these things: UK.gov, our wonderful ill-advised tech-obsessed leadership, has proposed universal road pricing in the past, which would require GPS/black box based tracking everywhere. Of course they were quick to point out that there would be no threat to privacy, but 18 months later the Metropolitan Police is requesting access to the records for the Oyster stored value travel card used by Transport for London to track people's movements, so in the end it can just be done in plain sight.
Our attitude to surveillance can be summed up by a frame in the original comic version of 'V for Vendetta' (not sure if it's in the film), where, after the security cameras have been disabled by V, a woman says that she misses them moving about as they felt familiar. That tinfoil might still come in handy.
Power6 is designed for servers so it's not likely. Had they been a year earlier to market we might have still not been running Windows on our G6 Powerbooks.