Give a fool a Volvo and he'll auger into a busload of kids, and they'll all die. Any system that allows End User mucking about will always result in unintended and, more often than not, deleterious consequences. The great unwashed and uncaring only concern themselves with whether their bloody email gets through - that their machine is just soooo slow (infected worse than a 14th St. hooker) doesn't give them pause. And it doesn't matter which OS they use. It's time to market an extremely dumbed down, idiot proof (out of the box) OS. But I don't see that happening in the forseeable future.
There's an enormous catalog of good stuff out there that would be marketable and most isn't all that dumbed down (Bronowski's Ascent of Man/Powers of Ten/Several execellent undergrad survey courses taped over the past three decades, etc.). The ability to append the `shows' with the most current info/thinking on the subjects covered would be an excellent means to introduce incipient geeks (no longer yard apes - but not yet dangers to themselves) to the process of science. It would be nice to have a channel where Bill Nye runs every morning at six and Feynman and friends lecture at eight. I'm much more interested in hooking up and reeling in, as yet, untarnished posterity, than merely entertaining the adult congregation of the faithful.
Too bad congress isn't going to allow DTV+ECHO merger. I'd gladly pay the freight for the extra bandwith. From `96-`99 DTV charged $8.95 mo. to feed me NBC, CBS, ABC, FOX (New York, Nashville,
LA, DC, Atlanta, etc.); now I'm only receiving FOX LA/NY. I don't bother with local broadcast networks (local NBC nabob informed me that I'd just have to adjust the antenna). There's more s**t loose than there is to see without fuzzy shots of some rerun that would only remind me that I should have been doing something constructive on some evening twenty years ago. Here in the back of beyond we pray for sat. internet but it's still 56k and smoke signals...
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Give a fool a Volvo and he'll auger into a busload of kids, and they'll all die. Any system that allows End User mucking about will always result in unintended and, more often than not, deleterious consequences. The great unwashed and uncaring only concern themselves with whether their bloody email gets through - that their machine is just soooo slow (infected worse than a 14th St. hooker) doesn't give them pause. And it doesn't matter which OS they use. It's time to market an extremely dumbed down, idiot proof (out of the box) OS. But I don't see that happening in the forseeable future.
There's an enormous catalog of good stuff out there that would be marketable and most isn't all that dumbed down (Bronowski's Ascent of Man/Powers of Ten/Several execellent undergrad survey courses taped over the past three decades, etc.). The ability to append the `shows' with the most current info/thinking on the subjects covered would be an excellent means to introduce incipient geeks (no longer yard apes - but not yet dangers to themselves) to the process of science. It would be nice to have a channel where Bill Nye runs every morning at six and Feynman and friends lecture at eight. I'm much more interested in hooking up and reeling in, as yet, untarnished posterity, than merely entertaining the adult congregation of the faithful.
Too bad congress isn't going to allow DTV+ECHO merger. I'd gladly pay the freight for the extra bandwith. From `96-`99 DTV charged $8.95 mo. to feed me NBC, CBS, ABC, FOX (New York, Nashville, LA, DC, Atlanta, etc.); now I'm only receiving FOX LA/NY. I don't bother with local broadcast networks (local NBC nabob informed me that I'd just have to adjust the antenna). There's more s**t loose than there is to see without fuzzy shots of some rerun that would only remind me that I should have been doing something constructive on some evening twenty years ago. Here in the back of beyond we pray for sat. internet but it's still 56k and smoke signals...