If you FTLITFA (follow the link in the article), you'll see that they intend to use the same model as over-the-air television: it will be supported by advertising.
I also see numerous mentions of being "family-friendly" and having "automatic filtering of indecent material." Yeah, that made me smirk, too, but considering its involvement with the FCC, and its proposal to service schools nationwide, I'm not surprised.
I'd be mildly interested to learn whether the advanced, non-free service also has "decency filters," but as long as commercial ISPs exist, I'll probably stick with them so that it never becomes an issue.
Agreed. The Slashdot summary should have used the last line of the article (which also happens to be a floating quote in very large type on the page):
'Look where the big guys aren't.... Embrace the chaos.'
That point is stressed a number of times in the article: Don't try to compete with the offerings of huge companies. The result will be all budget and no substance, if you even manage to complete it at all.
My favorite example of game innovation is still Tetris. It reinforces that the path to success isn't likely to come from technological muscle, but from finding something truly new. There are undoubtedly plenty of undiscovered genres that don't rely on horsepower.
Of course MS had enumerations built into Java back in 1998. Why did it take Sun 4 years to even start discussing it?
I'm guessing it was because of things like this. Java has done its best to avoid language bloat; the common term for it is "less is more." It's easy to accomplish the equivalent of an enum using a private constructor and public static instances. So a language-supported enum was regarded as unneeded.
No, it's not. I haven't played with every theme but I've tried at least six of them and they all get rendered properly by Swing. I've only tried it with 1.5, though. I've heard 1.6 still has a few problems, but I assume they'll be fixed before it leaves the beta state.
Editable table cells are an idiocy. They're a contrivance that some fool stuck in there because people saw a JTable and immediately reacted with "it looks like a spreadsheet."
Can you think of any native widget set, anywhere, that provides editable table cells? An embedded Excel component doesn't count.
There are dozens and dozens of open bugs regarding editable table cells. As a user interface, they suck. Do yourself and your users a favor and don't ever use them again.
More to the point, since they aren't part of any existing widget set, there's no specification for their behavior. The reason all those bugs exist is that no one has ever defined how editable cells should behave! The closest reference is Excel, but it has almost no other objects which can take focus, so it can't define focus behavior.
And no, you do not need editable table cells. Want to let the user change a text value? Have a button that brings up a little prompt dialog. Want to have changeable boolean values? Have nearby buttons labeled "Enable" and "Disable" (or whatever applies to your boolean column). You'll even gain the side benefit of letting the user change several rows at once, which is probably a better interface than forcing the user to individually click a checkbox inside a cell on each of the fifty rows he wants to change.
No it didn't.. MS took their J++ toolkit and java runtime/ JIT (which historically was the best out there) and refactored it as.NET.
But Sun's restrictions prevented it from being a lot worse. At least when I hear that a machine "has Java installed," I know it has a version of Java installed whose every class complies with its contract.
In other words, were it not for Sun's restrictions, writing Java today might very well be like attempting to write Javascript that works on every browser.
The GTK look-and-feel delegates a lot (all?) of its drawing to the currently installed GTK theme. Thus, text is drawn using GTK's rendering engine. Including the current antialiasing setting.
The GTK look-and-feel is probably the snappiest of them all. Nearly impossible to distinguish from a native application.
Those are just the beginnings of formal proceedings. It's probably safe to assume the concepts were in someone's head well before those dates. The JCP doesn't just let every whimsical thought immediately become a JSR, after all.
But you shouldn't need hard dates. Compare how many times Microsoft has created something from scratch successfully, with how many times they've copied other people's work. Suggesting they invented those language features is like suggesting AOL invented the Internet.
Many companies rushed to beat rivals with new software, and checking for bugs that could later be exploited by hackers was often seen as a waste of time. That has begun to change in the past few years as new laws force the disclosure of security holes and breaches...
What laws are these? This is the first I've heard of such a thing. And why do I have a feeling these laws have a clause that directly or indirectly exempts certain large software companies?
I hate buying from Wal-Mart, but sometimes they carry things that no one else in the area sells.
I live in a pretty rural area. The nearest actual town has no CompUSA, no Best Buy, and in fact no stores that sell significant computer hardware. There have been many times when I wished there were at least one such store.
Even in the sticks, there's a number of computer guys out here who wouldn't mind having a hands-on place from which to buy hardware. Why not buy online? Because often I want to look at the box and read the specs and such. Not to mention, it's much easier to return something to a physical store than it is to return something bought online.
So Wal-Mart has a chance to snag a pretty untapped market in my opinion.
I wouldn't count on it. Programmers and web authors get paid pretty well, and... well, the proliferation of badly designed web pages, badly designed apps, and unstable drivers speaks for itself.
Politicians get paid pretty well, but nearly all of them suck at doing their job.
And there's the increasing number of medical doctors who do their job with all the passion of a fry cook. They don't seem to be interested in helping patients as much as belting out a diagnosis and getting them to go away.
I'm not saying public schoolteachers don't deserve more money. In most cases they do. I'm just saying, higher salaries won't make a difference in the quality of teachers.
Verio is doing it too. Not long ago, I sent e-mail to a friend about a dirty joke I'd heard. It got rejected by Verio's SMTP server. (Not bounced; Mozilla displayed a dialog indicating the server refused to send it, with the only the status "Denied" given as the reason.)
I tried resending several times. I restarted Mozilla. I typed the password very carefully. It would not send.
Then I took out the dirty words and left the rest of the message, and it went through on the first try.
I'm not a child, and I don't appreciate being censored when I speak to other adults.
If there were any parts of my e-mail in all-caps, or if I mentioned mortgage rates or penis growth or cheap Xanax, I might be sympathetic. But I did none of those things. I haven't sent anything to more than two or three recipients in years. This e-mail went to one recipient. And I seriously doubt my Linux system is a spam zombie.
At least Verio's server notified me instead of black-holing my mail. This time.
Verizon keeps the support centers completely isolated from any of Verizon's actual workings. I'm pretty sure the support people have no ability to contact anyone at Verizon, no matter how far a call is "escalated." This way, Verizon can happily ignore complaints and/or drag its feet as much as it wishes. What are us customers going to about it? Verizon is an entrenched monopoly. It owns the lines. Except in some very rare cases, our only choice is to suck it down.
What you say is true, of course. It's not the fault of the support center. But there's no one else who can take the heat, and Verizon has set it up that way deliberately. I'd rather we continue to fume at the support center until it becomes clear to them that they're being screwed by Verizon corporate as much as we are. Eventually Verizon will get a reputation for only being able to retain unskilled idiots in their support center, which will hurt their name brand. Which will hamper their attempts to branch out into other areas of business where they're not a monopoly.
I don't think that deserves to be labeled flamebait.
This is something Microsoft has already done with other products they could not otherwise embrace, extend and extinguish: They simply make it look bad.
Like distributing Java 1.1 for years. Or having pages return degraded content for Opera browsers.
I don't know that they'll introduce actual data corruption, but I can certainly envision the VM doing a number of things very slowly, particularly if it's running Linux or emulating functionality that Linux is known to frequently rely on. It may not even be deliberately hobbled functionality, but rather "lax support" for some key functionality.
Like nearly everyone else, my immediate reaction was that spammers make millions and $475,000 is a slap on the wrist that will only encourage other spammers.
But then I got to this, near the end of the article:
Based on financial records provided by the defendants, the judgment will be suspended upon payment of $385,000 in cash and approximately $90,000 from the sale of real property. Should the court find that the defendants misrepresented their financial situations, the entire $2.4 million will be due.
It's easy to see what happened here. The spammers pleaded with the court, "But we don't have two million dollars!" The court was wary and said, "Fine, we'll just charge you the full worth of your company" (which wipes them out, effectively "shutting them down") but it appears the judge added a provision that if the spammers are lying to weasel out of the fine, they will be held accountable.
I have a feeling the spammers will flee the country when it becomes clear they were lying. But at least they will have been forced to give up their nice American lives and their nice American bandwidth. That just might make other spammers question whether the price is worth the profit.
Based purely on character (or lack of it), I confidently predict that Microsoft is going down.
Yeah, right.
I'm about as anti-Microsoft as you can get. I hate them. I hate them for making bad software and forcing zillions of people to use it instead of letting those people make a choice. I hate them for essentially undermining the best qualities of capitalism.
Many times I've wanted to believe "this is the end" and Microsoft is finally going to have the reputation in the general, non-techie public eye that they deserve to have. Heck, I'm still hoping the Vista debacle will be that trigger.
But to believe that one lawyer in Iowa is going to bring them down, when the full weight of the U.S. Department of Justice couldn't do it, and the E.U. is still trying to do it, is wishful thinking. Maybe Cringely just had to end with something dramatic.
You don't have a right to your kids not being exposed to porn. You never had that right in the US, not since the day the Constitution was signed.
You do have the right to monitor what they do. That's your job. Not the government's.
You have the right to earn their respect such that they'll consider porn lame because they know you consider it lame. That too is your job as a parent.
I don't care if every little thing on the net with a mention of a body part is relegated to.xxx, as long as it's never blocked.
But the moment a library terminal blocks.xxx, we have government censorship. And do you really think there won't be anything of value that gets lumped into.xxx by the US government's indefatigable wisdom?
Hell, I've done searches for information on obscure Java bugs while at work, and ended up blocked by the incompetent WebSense filter.
When recruiters ask me for a Word version, they get a (hand-written) HTML file. I used to send them the file as is, and tell them they are free to open it in Word if they want to. But I got tired of even bothering with that, so now I do 'cp resume.html resume.doc' and I send them that.
Yes, it is incredible that even web development houses not only prefer Word documents, but completely reject HTML documents. Once I worked for a web development team who wanted to write up a formal software process document. I suggested we keep it HTML so it could be easily maintained in CVS. The ferocity of the objects was unbelievable. These people, who made web pages for a living, were horrified by the thought of a document being maintained in HTML!
I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Most of them didn't know what CSS even is.
I think I heard that Google accepts HTML or plain text résumés, but does not accept Word résumés.
To be a little more back on topic: I almost never use a word processor. I hand-write HTML instead. It's pretty rare that I have a need for anything more complex than what HTML 4.01 can do. (Though I wish more browsers would support the CSS counter attributes.)
I see this as being a little like open source software. Just as open source exposes bugs to the world, ensuring a better quality product (because not many people will touch it if they can see it's crap), so too do these blogs expose all the corporate horseshit that has piled up in so many companies.
If companies have a problem with this, maybe they should just plain clean up their acts so they don't have to worry about it so much. And no, just having an "ethics statement" on the walls and in the orientation folder isn't enough.
I look forward to a time in the near future when companies are damn near meticulous about this, because they're constantly terrified of the bad press an anonymous blog might bring. They should be constantly terrified. How many other forces are strong enough to keep them in line?
Sure, there's always going to be someone who'll find something to bitch about, but if the company legitimately takes care of its people, it won't matter. It's not like reading someone's complaint that Acme Corporation never has Boston Creme donuts in the kitchen will keep me from applying to Acme Corporation. Or hiring them for contract work.
The company still has a right to fire the blogger, of course. But they do not have the right to subpoena the records of a blogging host or ISP in the course of their investigation. I'd sure like to believe that "lots of money is at stake therefore we get to trump law enforcement" doesn't fly with judges.
You're right, and this means early reviews may never be trustworthy.
I almost never pre-order games anyway, so I don't care if a review is written after the game is on the shelves. Even after release, a trustworthy review would be pretty valuable. Personally I'd rather wait an additional month and know more about what I'd be getting.
Eidos has learned in spades that just because we make it, does not means they will come.
Isn't this the problem with the videogaming industry as a whole? Isn't virtually every publisher counting on the name and the packaging to sell the game instead of bothering with a good game? It's only been said a few thousand times on Slashdot now.
I would think a game review site that isn't a payola machine or an outright front controlled by the publisher would be welcome, but maybe there's so much crap floating in the pool that it's a job too depressing for anyone to take on.
I don't mind academic research into things like this, but it's utterly impractical. We don't need empathic computers. We need software that isn't stupid.
Stupid software is the result of lazy programmers and lazy or inept software designers (though the two categories often overlap). For example, if your program gets a NamingException, you do NOT display an error dialog with "Operation failed due to NamingException." That's just insulting. Of course a user will want to kick the computer for that.
A real professional will write his program so it either falls back on a hard-coded default or provides the user with some actual solutions, like: "There was a problem communicating with the network. Have an administrator examine the program's log file." (A "Show Details" button would be nice, just in case the user knows what a NamingException is.)
I was using an excellent local ISP, ClarkNet, which had been around since well before the advent of the Web. Then they were bought by Verio.
I don't know when it happened, but one day I went to check on my web space, which had always been accessible as www.clark.net/~vgr, and discovered www.clark.net itself was simply redirecting to some Verio promotional page.
Where the hell were my files? After many phone calls to both Verio and to the few ClarkNet contact numbers I had, I learned that when ClarkNet's customers were "migrated," all web files were destroyed. Forever.
Verio's support was particularly irritating, since their first question was always, "Okay, what's your domain name?" I don't have a domain name, you jackass, you guys absorbed the competition who was from a time when domain names weren't handed out like candy. (Which was fine with me; a short URL is a short URL, regardless of the slash count.)
Perhaps if I'd been checking things frequently, I might have caught this at a time when they still had a backup somewhere. But I didn't check the web space frequently, because I never used it for commercial dealings; it was just a place to share some information.
The lesson I learned, of course, is to check one's web site frequently. And, as many other posts have said, back up your files yourself. The standard practices that every admin should follow, such as daily, weekly and monthly backups, are by no means practices to which large corporate ISPs feel bound. Indeed, I've since held a few jobs where it was evident the person administering the Windows server had little or no admin experience.
Slashdot Mirror
If you FTLITFA (follow the link in the article), you'll see that they intend to use the same model as over-the-air television: it will be supported by advertising.
I also see numerous mentions of being "family-friendly" and having "automatic filtering of indecent material." Yeah, that made me smirk, too, but considering its involvement with the FCC, and its proposal to service schools nationwide, I'm not surprised.
I'd be mildly interested to learn whether the advanced, non-free service also has "decency filters," but as long as commercial ISPs exist, I'll probably stick with them so that it never becomes an issue.
Agreed. The Slashdot summary should have used the last line of the article (which also happens to be a floating quote in very large type on the page):
... Embrace the chaos.'
'Look where the big guys aren't.
That point is stressed a number of times in the article: Don't try to compete with the offerings of huge companies. The result will be all budget and no substance, if you even manage to complete it at all.
My favorite example of game innovation is still Tetris. It reinforces that the path to success isn't likely to come from technological muscle, but from finding something truly new. There are undoubtedly plenty of undiscovered genres that don't rely on horsepower.
I'm guessing it was because of things like this. Java has done its best to avoid language bloat; the common term for it is "less is more." It's easy to accomplish the equivalent of an enum using a private constructor and public static instances. So a language-supported enum was regarded as unneeded.
No, it's not. I haven't played with every theme but I've tried at least six of them and they all get rendered properly by Swing. I've only tried it with 1.5, though. I've heard 1.6 still has a few problems, but I assume they'll be fixed before it leaves the beta state.
That's your fault.
Editable table cells are an idiocy. They're a contrivance that some fool stuck in there because people saw a JTable and immediately reacted with "it looks like a spreadsheet."
Can you think of any native widget set, anywhere, that provides editable table cells? An embedded Excel component doesn't count.
There are dozens and dozens of open bugs regarding editable table cells. As a user interface, they suck. Do yourself and your users a favor and don't ever use them again.
More to the point, since they aren't part of any existing widget set, there's no specification for their behavior. The reason all those bugs exist is that no one has ever defined how editable cells should behave! The closest reference is Excel, but it has almost no other objects which can take focus, so it can't define focus behavior.
And no, you do not need editable table cells. Want to let the user change a text value? Have a button that brings up a little prompt dialog. Want to have changeable boolean values? Have nearby buttons labeled "Enable" and "Disable" (or whatever applies to your boolean column). You'll even gain the side benefit of letting the user change several rows at once, which is probably a better interface than forcing the user to individually click a checkbox inside a cell on each of the fifty rows he wants to change.
But Sun's restrictions prevented it from being a lot worse. At least when I hear that a machine "has Java installed," I know it has a version of Java installed whose every class complies with its contract.
In other words, were it not for Sun's restrictions, writing Java today might very well be like attempting to write Javascript that works on every browser.
The GTK look-and-feel delegates a lot (all?) of its drawing to the currently installed GTK theme. Thus, text is drawn using GTK's rendering engine. Including the current antialiasing setting.
The GTK look-and-feel is probably the snappiest of them all. Nearly impossible to distinguish from a native application.
According to http://www.jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=14, discussion on generics officially began on May 11, 1999. (Exactly seven years ago.)
According to http://www.jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=201, discussion on enums, foreach loops and autoboxing officially began on December 3, 2002.
According to http://www.jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=175, discussion on annotations officially began on March 19, 2002.
Those are just the beginnings of formal proceedings. It's probably safe to assume the concepts were in someone's head well before those dates. The JCP doesn't just let every whimsical thought immediately become a JSR, after all.
But you shouldn't need hard dates. Compare how many times Microsoft has created something from scratch successfully, with how many times they've copied other people's work. Suggesting they invented those language features is like suggesting AOL invented the Internet.
[NDA = Non-disclosure agreement]
I've read through every NDA I've signed, and I strongly doubt that statement is correct. Though I admit, IANAL.
I hate buying from Wal-Mart, but sometimes they carry things that no one else in the area sells.
I live in a pretty rural area. The nearest actual town has no CompUSA, no Best Buy, and in fact no stores that sell significant computer hardware. There have been many times when I wished there were at least one such store.
Even in the sticks, there's a number of computer guys out here who wouldn't mind having a hands-on place from which to buy hardware. Why not buy online? Because often I want to look at the box and read the specs and such. Not to mention, it's much easier to return something to a physical store than it is to return something bought online.
So Wal-Mart has a chance to snag a pretty untapped market in my opinion.
I wouldn't count on it. Programmers and web authors get paid pretty well, and ... well, the proliferation of badly designed web pages, badly designed apps, and unstable drivers speaks for itself.
Politicians get paid pretty well, but nearly all of them suck at doing their job.
And there's the increasing number of medical doctors who do their job with all the passion of a fry cook. They don't seem to be interested in helping patients as much as belting out a diagnosis and getting them to go away.
I'm not saying public schoolteachers don't deserve more money. In most cases they do. I'm just saying, higher salaries won't make a difference in the quality of teachers.
Verio is doing it too. Not long ago, I sent e-mail to a friend about a dirty joke I'd heard. It got rejected by Verio's SMTP server. (Not bounced; Mozilla displayed a dialog indicating the server refused to send it, with the only the status "Denied" given as the reason.)
I tried resending several times. I restarted Mozilla. I typed the password very carefully. It would not send.
Then I took out the dirty words and left the rest of the message, and it went through on the first try.
I'm not a child, and I don't appreciate being censored when I speak to other adults.
If there were any parts of my e-mail in all-caps, or if I mentioned mortgage rates or penis growth or cheap Xanax, I might be sympathetic. But I did none of those things. I haven't sent anything to more than two or three recipients in years. This e-mail went to one recipient. And I seriously doubt my Linux system is a spam zombie.
At least Verio's server notified me instead of black-holing my mail. This time.
Verizon keeps the support centers completely isolated from any of Verizon's actual workings. I'm pretty sure the support people have no ability to contact anyone at Verizon, no matter how far a call is "escalated." This way, Verizon can happily ignore complaints and/or drag its feet as much as it wishes. What are us customers going to about it? Verizon is an entrenched monopoly. It owns the lines. Except in some very rare cases, our only choice is to suck it down.
What you say is true, of course. It's not the fault of the support center. But there's no one else who can take the heat, and Verizon has set it up that way deliberately. I'd rather we continue to fume at the support center until it becomes clear to them that they're being screwed by Verizon corporate as much as we are. Eventually Verizon will get a reputation for only being able to retain unskilled idiots in their support center, which will hurt their name brand. Which will hamper their attempts to branch out into other areas of business where they're not a monopoly.
I don't think that deserves to be labeled flamebait.
This is something Microsoft has already done with other products they could not otherwise embrace, extend and extinguish: They simply make it look bad.
Like distributing Java 1.1 for years. Or having pages return degraded content for Opera browsers.
I don't know that they'll introduce actual data corruption, but I can certainly envision the VM doing a number of things very slowly, particularly if it's running Linux or emulating functionality that Linux is known to frequently rely on. It may not even be deliberately hobbled functionality, but rather "lax support" for some key functionality.
Why would an "Exxon-Mobil shill" promote nuclear power?
But then I got to this, near the end of the article:
It's easy to see what happened here. The spammers pleaded with the court, "But we don't have two million dollars!" The court was wary and said, "Fine, we'll just charge you the full worth of your company" (which wipes them out, effectively "shutting them down") but it appears the judge added a provision that if the spammers are lying to weasel out of the fine, they will be held accountable.I have a feeling the spammers will flee the country when it becomes clear they were lying. But at least they will have been forced to give up their nice American lives and their nice American bandwidth. That just might make other spammers question whether the price is worth the profit.
I'm about as anti-Microsoft as you can get. I hate them. I hate them for making bad software and forcing zillions of people to use it instead of letting those people make a choice. I hate them for essentially undermining the best qualities of capitalism.
Many times I've wanted to believe "this is the end" and Microsoft is finally going to have the reputation in the general, non-techie public eye that they deserve to have. Heck, I'm still hoping the Vista debacle will be that trigger.
But to believe that one lawyer in Iowa is going to bring them down, when the full weight of the U.S. Department of Justice couldn't do it, and the E.U. is still trying to do it, is wishful thinking. Maybe Cringely just had to end with something dramatic.
You don't have a right to your kids not being exposed to porn. You never had that right in the US, not since the day the Constitution was signed.
.xxx, as long as it's never blocked.
.xxx, we have government censorship. And do you really think there won't be anything of value that gets lumped into .xxx by the US government's indefatigable wisdom?
You do have the right to monitor what they do. That's your job. Not the government's.
You have the right to earn their respect such that they'll consider porn lame because they know you consider it lame. That too is your job as a parent.
I don't care if every little thing on the net with a mention of a body part is relegated to
But the moment a library terminal blocks
Hell, I've done searches for information on obscure Java bugs while at work, and ended up blocked by the incompetent WebSense filter.
I do not have a Word version of my résumé.
When recruiters ask me for a Word version, they get a (hand-written) HTML file. I used to send them the file as is, and tell them they are free to open it in Word if they want to. But I got tired of even bothering with that, so now I do 'cp resume.html resume.doc' and I send them that.
Yes, it is incredible that even web development houses not only prefer Word documents, but completely reject HTML documents. Once I worked for a web development team who wanted to write up a formal software process document. I suggested we keep it HTML so it could be easily maintained in CVS. The ferocity of the objects was unbelievable. These people, who made web pages for a living, were horrified by the thought of a document being maintained in HTML!
I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Most of them didn't know what CSS even is.
I think I heard that Google accepts HTML or plain text résumés, but does not accept Word résumés.
To be a little more back on topic: I almost never use a word processor. I hand-write HTML instead. It's pretty rare that I have a need for anything more complex than what HTML 4.01 can do. (Though I wish more browsers would support the CSS counter attributes.)
I see this as being a little like open source software. Just as open source exposes bugs to the world, ensuring a better quality product (because not many people will touch it if they can see it's crap), so too do these blogs expose all the corporate horseshit that has piled up in so many companies.
If companies have a problem with this, maybe they should just plain clean up their acts so they don't have to worry about it so much. And no, just having an "ethics statement" on the walls and in the orientation folder isn't enough.
I look forward to a time in the near future when companies are damn near meticulous about this, because they're constantly terrified of the bad press an anonymous blog might bring. They should be constantly terrified. How many other forces are strong enough to keep them in line?
Sure, there's always going to be someone who'll find something to bitch about, but if the company legitimately takes care of its people, it won't matter. It's not like reading someone's complaint that Acme Corporation never has Boston Creme donuts in the kitchen will keep me from applying to Acme Corporation. Or hiring them for contract work.
The company still has a right to fire the blogger, of course. But they do not have the right to subpoena the records of a blogging host or ISP in the course of their investigation. I'd sure like to believe that "lots of money is at stake therefore we get to trump law enforcement" doesn't fly with judges.
You're right, and this means early reviews may never be trustworthy.
I almost never pre-order games anyway, so I don't care if a review is written after the game is on the shelves. Even after release, a trustworthy review would be pretty valuable. Personally I'd rather wait an additional month and know more about what I'd be getting.
I would think a game review site that isn't a payola machine or an outright front controlled by the publisher would be welcome, but maybe there's so much crap floating in the pool that it's a job too depressing for anyone to take on.
I don't mind academic research into things like this, but it's utterly impractical. We don't need empathic computers. We need software that isn't stupid.
Stupid software is the result of lazy programmers and lazy or inept software designers (though the two categories often overlap). For example, if your program gets a NamingException, you do NOT display an error dialog with "Operation failed due to NamingException." That's just insulting. Of course a user will want to kick the computer for that.
A real professional will write his program so it either falls back on a hard-coded default or provides the user with some actual solutions, like: "There was a problem communicating with the network. Have an administrator examine the program's log file." (A "Show Details" button would be nice, just in case the user knows what a NamingException is.)
I was using an excellent local ISP, ClarkNet, which had been around since well before the advent of the Web. Then they were bought by Verio.
I don't know when it happened, but one day I went to check on my web space, which had always been accessible as www.clark.net/~vgr, and discovered www.clark.net itself was simply redirecting to some Verio promotional page.
Where the hell were my files? After many phone calls to both Verio and to the few ClarkNet contact numbers I had, I learned that when ClarkNet's customers were "migrated," all web files were destroyed. Forever.
Verio's support was particularly irritating, since their first question was always, "Okay, what's your domain name?" I don't have a domain name, you jackass, you guys absorbed the competition who was from a time when domain names weren't handed out like candy. (Which was fine with me; a short URL is a short URL, regardless of the slash count.)
Perhaps if I'd been checking things frequently, I might have caught this at a time when they still had a backup somewhere. But I didn't check the web space frequently, because I never used it for commercial dealings; it was just a place to share some information.
The lesson I learned, of course, is to check one's web site frequently. And, as many other posts have said, back up your files yourself. The standard practices that every admin should follow, such as daily, weekly and monthly backups, are by no means practices to which large corporate ISPs feel bound. Indeed, I've since held a few jobs where it was evident the person administering the Windows server had little or no admin experience.