I love non-sequitir Subject lines. (And random caps as well) So, I'm a dad. My two year old sees me about two hours a night: after work (6:00PM) and before her bedtime (8:00PM). On weekends she has my full attention except for during her nap which is about an hour and half. In other words I give her as much time as I can. And I still find time to e-mail, post on various forums, compose original music, make movies, work on my photography hobby, work on a variety of computer projects, etc... My wife, a stay at home mom, is with our daughter a lot more than I am by virtue of the fact that she stays at home. So she's DYING for her own time. Our daughter has accepted that if my wife wants to check mail (just standard mail on a laptop, not a crackberry), she should busy herself with something else. Of course within reason. My wife is VERY attentive to our daughter. At the same time if I even make a motion to go anywhere NEAR a computer my daughter starts wailing. She has already somehow intuited that a computer + daddy can sometimes mean a long period of time where I'm not available. Even though I've never really put her through anything like that. I've had work situations where I've had to spend maybe an hour or two on the weekend working on something, but it's been infrequent. So I think kids definitely can deal with it. In reality the black berry is no different from a regular phone. Generations of kids survived mom's gossiping on the kitchen phone in the past. This is not going to be a huge tragedy. Honestly, do any of you resent the time your mom's spent on the phone when you were young?
That though has occurred to me actually. And I suggested to my wife that one of my closer friends should be given the root password for the system if that ever happens. But... for things like family photos and the like, I've burned multiple DVDs of the data and placed them with various members of the family/friend circle.
Running a home server is pretty negligable in terms of cost. My main server probably costs no more than $2 maybe $5 a month to run 24/7. It does nearly everything I outlined above with a few exceptions. However, my main point was that if the appliance was done right, it would make these things seamless to the end user.. It's seamless to my wife and the friends and family who use my darknet to access internal resources. Hell... I'm even setting up a private VoIP network for the softphones on said friend and family PCs. The net connection where I am has only gone down twice in nearly four years and this was only due to planned moves. I use UPS systems to backup the power for the main computers that make up my network as well as the switches and DSL modem. They also double for surge protection. Again, if all of this was integrated into an appliance, it would be pretty transparent to the end-user. I've had failed HDs as well, but that's why I have nightly backups to a different disk array. Again... if done properly in an appliance, the user would simply be notified to replace Drive 3 in set 4. This is all within reach of the average household as long as you throw away the outdated notion that these things require a genius to set up or maintain. If they're done right, they are nearly "set it and foget it" systems.
Software as a service? Yeah... I'm sure we're all going to want to be running Photoshop via the net and trust our precious photos to a third party. I can only agree to a point which is that each family or household should have an expandable central computer that can be scaled to the family. It would provide vital services that each family needs: web server, mail server, VPN server, file server, print server, time server, etc... Families should then be able to interconnect those machines via a LAN-to-LAN VPN system. And of course it should use friendly names that Joe and Jane Average can relate to. Do away with "central server" and call it a "FamilyNet Appliance" or some such claptrap. "Aunt Mary and Uncle John just got a FamilyNet box! Let's link them up the next time they come over. Aunt Mary said that she will bring the Trustcard (a flash device that stores and exchanges encryption keys between trusted machines along with IP info. Static IPs would be required for FamilyNet boxes.) with her so that their system will connect to ours. THAT gives the power to the end-user and not businesses. I don't know about you, but I don't even trust my e-mail to anyone but myself. I run my own mail server. I have ever since an ISP took my account of five years and gave it to someone else when they bought my old ISP and pretty much screwed every high-end customer over.
I think the Sun CTO's predictions also overlook what it is that people actually do with their computers. He's looking at it from completely the wrong angle: business application, specifically e-commerce. The majority of people use their computers for recreational and creative purposes. Sure, you have things like Youtube and MySpace that are all the rage right now, but they are merely distribution points. They aren't actual tools. TO put a video up on Youtube requires that you have a video camera, video capture capabilities on your PC or Mac, and ideally editing software plus all the associated tools to create the content. This is what people WANT. Until we all have 10 gigabit links to the internet and latency is sufficiently low, I don't think that content production tools are suited for network publishing over the internet (aka Software as a Service). This guy's head is up his ass in my opinion.
...I'd say productivity increases. videos.google.com, groups.google.com, images.google.com and gmail.com are all great ways to waste time when someone's at work...... (I LOVE ellipses. They are SO annoying...)
...just how much technological solutions can actually suck worse than old tried and true solutions? And I'm NOT a luddite, I love many different technologies. But I think electronic voting is something that can only work if it's done with no profit motive behind it. The machines and the work to make them SHOULD be completely free as part of civic duty on the part of individuals and businesses. Of course that will never happen because too many people have been brainwashed to think they can get rich by doing what their masters tell them.
That sounds about right. Unfortunately most of the stats at this link are based on the U.S. census which I've previously stated I don't totally trust. However, in my personal experience, nearly everyone I know makes somewhere between $30,000 and $70,000 a year. So it seems to bear out anecdotally for me.
Bigoted? Sure. I'm bigoted because I'm a white male witha hispanic mom, and a black cousin and prefer to live in integrated cities rather then segregated ones. Yeah. Color me bigoted. Sorry, but I think ANY area that is not integrated is a frightening thing. It implies intolerance for other ethnicities. I don't have a problem with white people. I have a problem with white people who don't want anyone else in their neiborhood but other whites.
I would have made an attempt to apologize for the loss I caused them and then tried to find someone to settle up with. I would then have paid the family responsible for the animal with enough cash to buy them more cows, but at the same time attempted to make it clear that I understand that the cash makes little difference. As someone once explained to me, the loss of one of these animals is more akin to the loss of a relative. Could you imagine the uproar here in the U.S. if someone ran over another person's loved one and then threw some money up in the air just to get back in the car and take off?
You're RIGHT!!!! I suggest that we do what most conservatives are itching to do here and round up anyone foolish enough to have been born in a land where you can't survive (ie. black people) put them in containment camps, "decommision" them, and then make fertilizer! That's what Red America wants by dammit!!!
I agree with you up to the point where you imply that becoming wealthy is a life goal. It's not mine. My goal is simply to live a comfortable and reasonable life without negatively impacting anyone below me in terms of economy. I have no problem with my money helping those out in lesser financial status and I think it's only fair that those above me accomodate me in the same way. But my opinion is an old one from when America was a great place. Before the Reagan era came and started sweeping away all the hard work...
You're RIGHT! I'm going to the African Savannah for my next fishing expedition!!! And after that I'll kill cougars for some of those yummy bitter flank steaks. Then I'm going to open a farm that will grow vast fields of wheat, barley and corn in the sand and irrigate it with the fresh clean water from the amazing lakes and rivers where I went fishing! Great plan!!!
I'll hold you to that and raise you a, "I hope you will be patting yourself on the back saying, 'at least I didn't get eaten by a lion' when you have some wasting disease as an old man and no amount of money can help you".;P Jeers.
Mods please mod parent up. Thanks for posting this. I'll have to read it a few times to wrap my mind around it as it's pretty complex stuff. But it seems like it touches on some things that I've hitherto suspected about economics. Awesome info.
Interesting. I'm not a "money guy" so I can't even concieve of such things. To me, I just want to walk into a doctor's office any time I need to and know that I don't have to pay more than at most $50. Same with prescriptions, I want to know that I can get the medicine I need without having to pay out of pocket for it. However, in my case the baby (now toddler) needed lots of routine visits as did my wife, so the family coverage was worth it. My wife is a stay at home mom currently, so I think it works out just fine for now. But if she goes back to work I might consider what you're suggesting. The only other problem I've got with it though is that I like things that are pretty much "set it and forget it" when it comes to money. I hate dealing with money matters, so if it added an extra burden to manage, that's about the only other downside I could see. Investing is definitely out for me because I'd likely put myself into financial ruin.
I don't dispute that there are costs. But, I also suggest that the store owners take advantage of the opportunity to raise the prices much higher than necessary. A related example is when my city was part of that huge blackout in 2003 that knocked out most of the northeastern U.S. power grid. The power was out for two days and the grocery stores lost a lot of their frozen food, produce, meat, etc... I expected prices to go up to account for the loss. What I didn't expect was for the prices to STAY up well after the losses were recouped. The prices didn't go down to pre-blackout levels. In fact they continued to climb. Any time a business has the opportunity to raise prices and try and keep them artificially inflated, they will. That's all I'm saying.
I don't think I'd be comfortable "living like a king" among the poor. I had a recent salesperson relate a disgusting story to me which he and some of my other co-workers found to be entertaining. He spoke of how he was travelling through india in a Range Rover and accidentally hit a cow that had significant meaning to the people in this poor village. The people who loved the cow came out and wailed at the loss and it caused quite a fuss. This salesman was losing patience with the interruption of his drive. So he pulled out the equivalent of U.S. $10 called everyone's attention to it and threw it far away from the path of his vehicle. Apparently there was a mad desperate dash for the money and he just hig tailed it out of there. I found the story thoroughly disgusting.
It all depends on your employer and the general health of your entire organization. I know that at my last place of employment I was paying $250 a month for single coverage. People with families were paying $575 a month. The new place I work at I paid $79 a month as a single person but the coverage sucked as it didn't cover anything I needed it to. They changed providers soon after and my monthly costs went up to about $200 a month which provided me with decent single coverage. Then I got married... had a kid... and now my monthly is about $500 a month. In addition to that my employer pays another $350 a month so the actual bill for family coverage is about $800 a month. If you work for yourself and you have the option to chose something, you might be able to get a better deal. But then again, how often do you actually need to use your coverage and how well does it REALLY cover you? It's one thing to pay a lower rate. It's an entirely different thing to be denied payment for vital services.
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I love non-sequitir Subject lines. (And random caps as well) So, I'm a dad. My two year old sees me about two hours a night: after work (6:00PM) and before her bedtime (8:00PM). On weekends she has my full attention except for during her nap which is about an hour and half. In other words I give her as much time as I can. And I still find time to e-mail, post on various forums, compose original music, make movies, work on my photography hobby, work on a variety of computer projects, etc... My wife, a stay at home mom, is with our daughter a lot more than I am by virtue of the fact that she stays at home. So she's DYING for her own time. Our daughter has accepted that if my wife wants to check mail (just standard mail on a laptop, not a crackberry), she should busy herself with something else. Of course within reason. My wife is VERY attentive to our daughter. At the same time if I even make a motion to go anywhere NEAR a computer my daughter starts wailing. She has already somehow intuited that a computer + daddy can sometimes mean a long period of time where I'm not available. Even though I've never really put her through anything like that. I've had work situations where I've had to spend maybe an hour or two on the weekend working on something, but it's been infrequent. So I think kids definitely can deal with it. In reality the black berry is no different from a regular phone. Generations of kids survived mom's gossiping on the kitchen phone in the past. This is not going to be a huge tragedy. Honestly, do any of you resent the time your mom's spent on the phone when you were young?
...it will wind up smelling like pee. ;P A nod to the_mad_poster.
That though has occurred to me actually. And I suggested to my wife that one of my closer friends should be given the root password for the system if that ever happens. But... for things like family photos and the like, I've burned multiple DVDs of the data and placed them with various members of the family/friend circle.
Running a home server is pretty negligable in terms of cost. My main server probably costs no more than $2 maybe $5 a month to run 24/7. It does nearly everything I outlined above with a few exceptions. However, my main point was that if the appliance was done right, it would make these things seamless to the end user.. It's seamless to my wife and the friends and family who use my darknet to access internal resources. Hell... I'm even setting up a private VoIP network for the softphones on said friend and family PCs. The net connection where I am has only gone down twice in nearly four years and this was only due to planned moves. I use UPS systems to backup the power for the main computers that make up my network as well as the switches and DSL modem. They also double for surge protection. Again, if all of this was integrated into an appliance, it would be pretty transparent to the end-user. I've had failed HDs as well, but that's why I have nightly backups to a different disk array. Again... if done properly in an appliance, the user would simply be notified to replace Drive 3 in set 4. This is all within reach of the average household as long as you throw away the outdated notion that these things require a genius to set up or maintain. If they're done right, they are nearly "set it and foget it" systems.
I might actually be able to back my data up at home to something other than more striped HDs!!
Software as a service? Yeah... I'm sure we're all going to want to be running Photoshop via the net and trust our precious photos to a third party. I can only agree to a point which is that each family or household should have an expandable central computer that can be scaled to the family. It would provide vital services that each family needs: web server, mail server, VPN server, file server, print server, time server, etc... Families should then be able to interconnect those machines via a LAN-to-LAN VPN system. And of course it should use friendly names that Joe and Jane Average can relate to. Do away with "central server" and call it a "FamilyNet Appliance" or some such claptrap. "Aunt Mary and Uncle John just got a FamilyNet box! Let's link them up the next time they come over. Aunt Mary said that she will bring the Trustcard (a flash device that stores and exchanges encryption keys between trusted machines along with IP info. Static IPs would be required for FamilyNet boxes.) with her so that their system will connect to ours. THAT gives the power to the end-user and not businesses. I don't know about you, but I don't even trust my e-mail to anyone but myself. I run my own mail server. I have ever since an ISP took my account of five years and gave it to someone else when they bought my old ISP and pretty much screwed every high-end customer over.
I think the Sun CTO's predictions also overlook what it is that people actually do with their computers. He's looking at it from completely the wrong angle: business application, specifically e-commerce. The majority of people use their computers for recreational and creative purposes. Sure, you have things like Youtube and MySpace that are all the rage right now, but they are merely distribution points. They aren't actual tools. TO put a video up on Youtube requires that you have a video camera, video capture capabilities on your PC or Mac, and ideally editing software plus all the associated tools to create the content. This is what people WANT. Until we all have 10 gigabit links to the internet and latency is sufficiently low, I don't think that content production tools are suited for network publishing over the internet (aka Software as a Service). This guy's head is up his ass in my opinion.
...I'd say productivity increases. videos.google.com, groups.google.com, images.google.com and gmail.com are all great ways to waste time when someone's at work... ... (I LOVE ellipses. They are SO annoying...)
...just how much technological solutions can actually suck worse than old tried and true solutions? And I'm NOT a luddite, I love many different technologies. But I think electronic voting is something that can only work if it's done with no profit motive behind it. The machines and the work to make them SHOULD be completely free as part of civic duty on the part of individuals and businesses. Of course that will never happen because too many people have been brainwashed to think they can get rich by doing what their masters tell them.
Awesome SIG and a great comment. If only I had mod points. +10 Hilarious
That sounds about right. Unfortunately most of the stats at this link are based on the U.S. census which I've previously stated I don't totally trust. However, in my personal experience, nearly everyone I know makes somewhere between $30,000 and $70,000 a year. So it seems to bear out anecdotally for me.
Bigoted? Sure. I'm bigoted because I'm a white male witha hispanic mom, and a black cousin and prefer to live in integrated cities rather then segregated ones. Yeah. Color me bigoted. Sorry, but I think ANY area that is not integrated is a frightening thing. It implies intolerance for other ethnicities. I don't have a problem with white people. I have a problem with white people who don't want anyone else in their neiborhood but other whites.
Apologies to conservatives. That should have been "Occupied Republican Party". Not all conservatives are idiots. Just the ones who say "Rah rah Bush".
I would have made an attempt to apologize for the loss I caused them and then tried to find someone to settle up with. I would then have paid the family responsible for the animal with enough cash to buy them more cows, but at the same time attempted to make it clear that I understand that the cash makes little difference. As someone once explained to me, the loss of one of these animals is more akin to the loss of a relative. Could you imagine the uproar here in the U.S. if someone ran over another person's loved one and then threw some money up in the air just to get back in the car and take off?
You're RIGHT!!!! I suggest that we do what most conservatives are itching to do here and round up anyone foolish enough to have been born in a land where you can't survive (ie. black people) put them in containment camps, "decommision" them, and then make fertilizer! That's what Red America wants by dammit!!!
I agree with you up to the point where you imply that becoming wealthy is a life goal. It's not mine. My goal is simply to live a comfortable and reasonable life without negatively impacting anyone below me in terms of economy. I have no problem with my money helping those out in lesser financial status and I think it's only fair that those above me accomodate me in the same way. But my opinion is an old one from when America was a great place. Before the Reagan era came and started sweeping away all the hard work...
You're RIGHT! I'm going to the African Savannah for my next fishing expedition!!! And after that I'll kill cougars for some of those yummy bitter flank steaks. Then I'm going to open a farm that will grow vast fields of wheat, barley and corn in the sand and irrigate it with the fresh clean water from the amazing lakes and rivers where I went fishing! Great plan!!!
I'll hold you to that and raise you a, "I hope you will be patting yourself on the back saying, 'at least I didn't get eaten by a lion' when you have some wasting disease as an old man and no amount of money can help you". ;P Jeers.
Mods please mod parent up. Thanks for posting this. I'll have to read it a few times to wrap my mind around it as it's pretty complex stuff. But it seems like it touches on some things that I've hitherto suspected about economics. Awesome info.
Thanks for trying. You'll have to do better than that. Cute though.
Hehehe... Wow. Well that's in keeping with this guy. I suspected him to be a liar from the outset. Now I have possible proof. Thanks. :P
Interesting. I'm not a "money guy" so I can't even concieve of such things. To me, I just want to walk into a doctor's office any time I need to and know that I don't have to pay more than at most $50. Same with prescriptions, I want to know that I can get the medicine I need without having to pay out of pocket for it. However, in my case the baby (now toddler) needed lots of routine visits as did my wife, so the family coverage was worth it. My wife is a stay at home mom currently, so I think it works out just fine for now. But if she goes back to work I might consider what you're suggesting. The only other problem I've got with it though is that I like things that are pretty much "set it and forget it" when it comes to money. I hate dealing with money matters, so if it added an extra burden to manage, that's about the only other downside I could see. Investing is definitely out for me because I'd likely put myself into financial ruin.
You obviously fail to understand the finer points of humor on many levels. Too bad for you.
I don't dispute that there are costs. But, I also suggest that the store owners take advantage of the opportunity to raise the prices much higher than necessary. A related example is when my city was part of that huge blackout in 2003 that knocked out most of the northeastern U.S. power grid. The power was out for two days and the grocery stores lost a lot of their frozen food, produce, meat, etc... I expected prices to go up to account for the loss. What I didn't expect was for the prices to STAY up well after the losses were recouped. The prices didn't go down to pre-blackout levels. In fact they continued to climb. Any time a business has the opportunity to raise prices and try and keep them artificially inflated, they will. That's all I'm saying.
I don't think I'd be comfortable "living like a king" among the poor. I had a recent salesperson relate a disgusting story to me which he and some of my other co-workers found to be entertaining. He spoke of how he was travelling through india in a Range Rover and accidentally hit a cow that had significant meaning to the people in this poor village. The people who loved the cow came out and wailed at the loss and it caused quite a fuss. This salesman was losing patience with the interruption of his drive. So he pulled out the equivalent of U.S. $10 called everyone's attention to it and threw it far away from the path of his vehicle. Apparently there was a mad desperate dash for the money and he just hig tailed it out of there. I found the story thoroughly disgusting.
It all depends on your employer and the general health of your entire organization. I know that at my last place of employment I was paying $250 a month for single coverage. People with families were paying $575 a month. The new place I work at I paid $79 a month as a single person but the coverage sucked as it didn't cover anything I needed it to. They changed providers soon after and my monthly costs went up to about $200 a month which provided me with decent single coverage. Then I got married... had a kid... and now my monthly is about $500 a month. In addition to that my employer pays another $350 a month so the actual bill for family coverage is about $800 a month. If you work for yourself and you have the option to chose something, you might be able to get a better deal. But then again, how often do you actually need to use your coverage and how well does it REALLY cover you? It's one thing to pay a lower rate. It's an entirely different thing to be denied payment for vital services.