This is a public service announcement . . . with keyboard . . .
If the BBC has committed to supporting one product above others in the market place--that is, the DRM platform in Media Player--then politely inform the BBC that you will not pay your license fee until universal access is provided. Such a blatant attempt to support a commercial organization through a government programme should be most strongly resisted. Moreover, it is only when the citizens require that government truly level the playing field, rather than prop up commercial organization's poor products through forced purchases, that they have fulfilled their consumer and market protection goals.
Windows DRM = No TV Tax! (too bad bumper stickers aren't so popular over there)
Then again, this whole tirade is easy for me to say, as I'm in the States. Nonetheless, if Bush and the other Royalists here started the same crap, I'd resist. I've done with web sites that only support IE, and I will do it every time that lazy developers and foolish, ill-informed managers make decisions that prevent all the citizens from accessing the services of the government!
Otherwise, Verizon will never, ever get any of my business. If they work to cut off my Vonage service--something that keeps my business costs down--I will make sure to avoid them at all costs and to counsel every business with which I work to do the same. It's one thing to defend a patent; it's another to destroy another company, to throw many people out of work, and to cause severe hardship to many customers. Verizon should set up a favorable license, so that they can get their cut. But it should not kill Vonage in the process.
Work out some licensing deal, Vonage and Verizon. Why? Because, in the end, it's the right thing to do.
They got fat, dumb, and happy on their profits and the ubiquity of the WinTel platform. OTOH, AMD has stepped up, innovated, and in places leapfrogged Intel in design, performance, and price.
Sadly, this effect happens to all large companies. They stop innovating. They instead focus on shoring up their stock and capital to keep investors happy, lowering risk, and start focusing on acquisitions to bring in new ideas and new blood. Intel is no different than any other company.
There is a solution: skunkworks new ideas. Throw time, effort, money, and brainpower at innovation, with NO guarantee of returns. Then, when new products are created, don't squash them under a controlling corporate culture. Let them grow internally, with support. Intrapreneurship does not look at org charts or worry about the bottom line as much as the next 5 years.
Do I get to open up a can of Whoop Ass on Ballmer for making me buy PCs with Windows? He's robbing from me!
Come to think of it, after seeing "Dance Monkey Boy," I see that his kung fu is quite strong. I doubt though that he could defend against my Iron Developer Technique!
We might be a step in the grand evolution, but so are ferns, moss, fungi, evergreens, ants, bees. Everything around today is the next step in grand evolution, regardless of its intelligence, awareness, or bra size. Humans are no more exquisite than whales, bonobos, or lemurs. We all are the result of the evolutionary process, and right now, we all are successful result to that process. Humans have NO favor or sway. To consider it any other way is hubris.
Not all of us want to live under rocks. There are many good productions on TV; the issues revolve around their delivery.
I see TV becoming more akin to books, that is any place, any time delivery systems of information. What really does that mean:
You can watch a production whenever you wish--after it's been published/broadcasted, as it were.
You can watch a production where ever you wish--if it's ok with the person next to you in the plane, as it were.
You can watch a production on what device you want--so I can catch up on an interesting story on the hellishly boring treadmill.
You can watch only the productions you want to watch--and not be forced to sit through yet another Survivor load of backstabing bastards whose only claim to fame will be their appearance naked on TV.
That does not imply for all the fearmongers out there widespread copying etc. There are ways to make this vision work, but it has to be openly embraced by producers and distributors, not fought tooth and nail. All they need to actually look around. TV is starting to work this way, but because of people wanting it this way, not because of the producers' efforts. It's the reality of TiVos, downloading the media to your PSP to watch on a plane, or torrenting an episode that you might have missed (because the bastards pre-empted my coverage for some news crap I did not even care about).
It is incredibly difficult to produce a "market" leader measure without some consideration to the way that the market is measured. Fundamentally, that method determines the leader. Consider the obvious:
If you measure by units sold in a particular month, you would miss a sizable chunk of the market. How? Well, for nearly every 4 years, every system I installed at SMBs (small to mid-size businesses) was either Debian or Gentoo. As such, there was no direct cost associated with those units, but they were the foundations of many applications, file and print services, email services, directory services, databases, etc. More and more, as much of the functionality of a file and print server is commoditized, it can be handled more cost effectively by Linux, Samba, and other OS apps. Therefore, since these items incur no revenue in the market to a company, they would not be counted. Thus the distortion.
If you consider units deployed, you have a difficult data mining challenge. How do you collect the vast amounts of data? As a researcher at times, you'd have to subscribe a number of organizations--we're talking hundreds--and then over the span of years, see what their deployment considerations are. From that measure, you can more accurately determine the statistically valid (within 5% perhaps) measure of deployed systems, more accurately demonstrating a market. It's a market, but in a different way, that is, for ancilliary products and services, upgrades, etc.
If you measure a market by sales, you distort the market by not considering all forms of distributed products. When I install a MS system, there typically is required a number of ancilliary products that must be installed, including things like SQL Server (to hold the LDAP store). Are these sales counted as part of the market? Without Active Directory, you almost can't do anything else--SharePoint, Exchange, etc. Therefore, it is almost a component of the OS. On a comparable *nix, you would simply use a compliant LDAP system, but then, you would not consider it part of the OS. Considering the LDAP may be from another company, it further distorts the true market.
The market measure should be considered a dubious statistic, much like a political one. Raising the overall spending on education means nothing. Raising the overall spending per student, that means something. If you raise overall spending per student in constant dollars (inflation adjusted dollars), now you are really producing an accurate measure. The fact that most people can't understand basic comparisons--read the book Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos--leads to this fallacy of a measurement.
Even though I have a discount for the price of my current Xbox for the new one (one reason to get a decent warranty), I'm waiting until later this year to make the move. I'm not a wild fan of Xbox, and I do not see any major reason to upgrade. The real games I like (HL2, etc.) are still available on the Xbox. The 2 just seems like additional capability for the future, but not the present. Any one else waiting?
I have a bank account with a UK bank, and over there (I'm a US citizen) to use their web site, you have to have additional information. For me, I have to provide: - a membership number - a secret word (they ask for letters or numbers from the secret word) - a passcode - an account number
It takes several forms, but I don't have yet a third bulky RSA key to carry around.
How about just have people answer 10 questions and then use 3 of those answers, things like, your favorite color (blue, no green), car color (fun for those who do not have a car), or favorite movie. Stuff that no db keeps.
ADA should apply to any web site the government puts together that cannot be declared protected in this War on Terrorism. But then, we all know that the terrorists hate our way of life, so they will hate us helping each other. Thus, I expect rampant attacks to start any day now. Not like the good old American criminals setting up bogus contribution sites, no, these attacks will be merciless. They will fill out forms for dead people, moo ha ha ha!
to anything that has weapons potential, I'm all for it. What fool would give a child a gun? No one. So why connect a new AI computer system, modelling a human brain, to weapons? Crap, keep it off the grid entirely, until we are certain it's not insane or sociopathic.
Would the government, especially this one which is even loathe to open their fly to take a piss, be likely to just create an open test? Then, regardless of what performs and how it's designed, as long as it demonstrates it means the Government Authorization Test, it's good in Uncle Sam's eyes.
Even more diabolical would be the idea that by opening the code to such devices, there are DRM issues associated. Could they be sneaky enough to link the DMCA into this decision, issuing a counter-claim against the judges for issuing their ruling? Devious minds think alike...
Sure, as a former Chief Architect at Lotus and IBM, I may be biased . . . but I actually knew how to use Notes. Every time someone complained about Notes, it was not Notes they were complaining about. They were complaining about some crappy Notes DB that was so poorly designed that it worked horribly. Put a bug tracking system in Notes; good for under several hundred bugs. Anything more, and you can't do it easily. As for Apache/PHP/SQL, sure, you could reproduce what you could do in Notes, to a point. But, it would cost you A LOT MORE, and you would never get off-line capabilities. Something those of us on plane trips always appreciated. So, don't complain about the technology when you should be complaining about the implementation. Notes was good for certain things. RDBMSs are good at other things. Each has their strengths and weaknesses. But don't confuse the two. Notes is not a transaction system, and despite the hype, BLOB support still sucks under RDBMSs.
Since MS made an investment, Groove became more and more of a MS-centric tool. It acquired presence technology, but only using Messenger. It integrated into Outlook, but nothing else. It published information to Sharepoint. And the development environment was nothing but COM objects from here as long as the eye could see. It saddens me that Groove did not make a real P2P collaboration platform, providing a platform independent object layer via specifications. The end result was a Windows-only collaboration platform that business purchase but never really knew what to do with.
Just like you don't use Oracle to handle a simple little db holding some responses to a recent questionnaire or for a quick little conference, I would not use MySQL for a big data warehouse or SAP deployment. Silly db admins have gotten it into their head that DBs at all levels should be compared equally. That is simply not true. Use what's appropriate where it's appropriate. Don't use C for a quick data analysis tool (try Excel first), and don't develop full enterprise apps using cobbled together MS-Office solutions.
I can buy into this argument. Thus, from it, we get global connectivity but not global access.
OTOH, all our network coding/decoding now has to undergo considerable overhead. Is the change in philosophy worth the cost?
I wonder.
I have found that if you mix vendor implementations of security--NetGear, Dell's wireless internal card, Linksys cards--they often do not work with encryption enabled. I have tried going up to 128bit, down to 64/40bit, setting NIC restrictions and the like, but in the end, it often is just fruitless with encryption. So, I usually just keep NIC restrictions on. Some hope from the random attacker, but no real protection.
If you want us to use security, make it simple. Make is to that I can type in a phrase for EVERY implementation, and that it generates acceptable keys. I don't want to type in a phrase for one vendor, and then have to hack out what the keys are for another. Then, just make it work. I don't want any one vendors card different than any other. When I use a Base-T cable, it works, regardless of vendor. That's what we want, folks.
The gauntlet is thrown down. I challenge this man to come up with a demonstrable "trojan horse" in an OS piece of software that cannot be found in a reasonable period of time by a security audit (the kind the government does of OS software to be used). Such fear mongering should be laughed at with, torn up, and spit upon whenever you see or hear it. It reminds me of Ridge getting up and saying, well, there's a threat around the election, but we have no evidence of it. Be scared (and vote for Bush). Yea . . . right. I didn't just fall off the turnip truck.
for taking me to a place that sadly I will never be able to go. Growing up on sci-fi, Star Trek, and Space 1999, I dreampt of standing on Titan's shores. Now I know a bit more about what is really there. So, from one explorer born about 500 years too early, I just extend my thanks to the Cassini team. Congratulations, and keep the science coming!
I am saddened to see termos have to deride the Gentoo distro. As someone who runs 3 distros--RedHat at work, SuSE for my server, and Gentoo for my laptop and workstation--such criticisms are totally unfounded.
Why do I use Gentoo? For the simple fact that I kept bumping into RPMs that needed to be recompiled. Heck, if I'm going to recompile RPMs, I might as well just go for the source, where I can tell it I don't certain features (like OSS support, etc.). Gentoo also taught me a lot more about my system, since you do have to know more to get it going. If you think that you can just "emerge world", sadly, sometimes, it does not work.
As for the eMachines comment, well, if termos wants to "whip it out", let's just compare workstations...I've got a dual P4 2.8 GHz with 4GB RAM, an SATA array with 500 GB of hard drive space, 2 ATI 9800 (one AGP, one PCI) with 2 21" LCDs and 1 20" LCD, an Audigy 2 ZS Platinum Pro (just installed), running 2.6.6 with mm patches. Gentoo handles it just fine, and I guarantee it blows past any off-the-shelf RPM distro. Why? Because I upgraded it from SuSE; it's considerably faster, and I've never looked back.
So, please don't talk about what you may not really use or know. To each his own. That's the real value of Open Source.
Here's the problem. The more we look at tiny things, the more myopic we become. You can only laser your cornea down so much, and then there's just not enough to work with any more. I love the increased VGA resolution, but the screen needs to INCREASE; otherwise, we'll all go blind. I have a Treo 600, and there's goodness in that 160x120 screen. Not too tough on the eyes.
I can only hope that this service gets extended to a wider (hint hint nudge nudge -- read US) audience. As a subscriber to BBC America and frequent traveller to the UK, all I can say is that BBC America is a sad and poor rip-off. I want the bite only the BBC can make, including "Have I Got News For You," "England's Dirtiest Homes," and real comedy like the original "Coupling" (not to be confused with the absurb American pap they tried to sell us over here).
If it doesn't, I'm going to set up a home-made video box over there just to record stuff, so that I can download it to my PC. "Footballers' Wives", here I come.
Really, even look at CSI. It's not a show about the science of forensic analysis, how they can use DNA to determine a 1 in a billion chance of who did it, or how lasers help them solve crimes. It's about the story. It's always been about the story.
Consider the oldest stories, like the Indian epic the Mahabharata or the Greek's Iliad. It's not about the wars or conflicts. It's about the interplay between people. It's always been about the context of the people. We as people want to see other people experiencing things.
Now, look at the lastest successful sci-fi, IMHO Babylon 5. Sure, they made space fighting a lot more realistic. But it was the story of the Shadows vs. the Vorlons, Sheridan's heroic sacrifice on Z'ha'dum, and the betrayal of Garibaldi. Really, look at this summary about the conflict:
The Shadows, awakened years earlier from a millenium-long slumber on their ancestral home of Z'ha'dum, gradually made their presence known, and their purpose became clear: weeding out the weak and defenseless among the younger races to promote rapid evolution. Moving largely behind the scenes, they set the younger races upon one another, causing wars and inciting genocide. The Shadows are the embodiment of the question, "What do you want?" They seek not military victory, but philosophical dominance, a universe in which younger races scramble madly to attain their goals without regard for the consequences. Such an environment demands chaos, and it's chaos the Shadows have so effectively brought upon the major races.
When the other First Ones departed for reasons of their own, the Vorlons were left behind to oppose the Shadow philosophy. If the Shadows represent chaos, the Vorlons are lords of order: they seek the same outcome, the advancement of younger races, but on their terms, whether their charges like it or not. The Vorlons prefer to ask the question, "Who are you?" It is a question that leads to introspection and spiritual growth, but not to expansion or scientific advancement.
Unfortunately, the struggle between the two philosophies is played out not among the ancients, but among the younger races, unwitting pawns in a game few yet realize is being played.
Little here talks about science, the reality of evolution, or the underlying science. It's about philosophy, life, and the questions we all encounter along our own life. That's the story, and that's what made it more interesting than any show about cool tools. It's never been about the tools. They just get us to start watching. It's always been about the relationships, whether we want to admit it or not.
In my old days, I once had an Apple IIci running AUX. Inside that system, I ran the Macintosh app Virtual PC. (At least I think that was it's name, but that was a long time ago . . . a long long time ago... 1993) Inside of Virtual PC, I installed DOS 6.22. Then, low and behold, I boot up Windows 3.11. At the time, it was the most convoluted way to run Windows, but it worked. Slowly. Very very slowly. But it worked.
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If the BBC has committed to supporting one product above others in the market place--that is, the DRM platform in Media Player--then politely inform the BBC that you will not pay your license fee until universal access is provided. Such a blatant attempt to support a commercial organization through a government programme should be most strongly resisted. Moreover, it is only when the citizens require that government truly level the playing field, rather than prop up commercial organization's poor products through forced purchases, that they have fulfilled their consumer and market protection goals.
Windows DRM = No TV Tax!
(too bad bumper stickers aren't so popular over there)
Then again, this whole tirade is easy for me to say, as I'm in the States. Nonetheless, if Bush and the other Royalists here started the same crap, I'd resist. I've done with web sites that only support IE, and I will do it every time that lazy developers and foolish, ill-informed managers make decisions that prevent all the citizens from accessing the services of the government!
Otherwise, Verizon will never, ever get any of my business. If they work to cut off my Vonage service--something that keeps my business costs down--I will make sure to avoid them at all costs and to counsel every business with which I work to do the same. It's one thing to defend a patent; it's another to destroy another company, to throw many people out of work, and to cause severe hardship to many customers. Verizon should set up a favorable license, so that they can get their cut. But it should not kill Vonage in the process.
Work out some licensing deal, Vonage and Verizon. Why? Because, in the end, it's the right thing to do.
They got fat, dumb, and happy on their profits and the ubiquity of the WinTel platform. OTOH, AMD has stepped up, innovated, and in places leapfrogged Intel in design, performance, and price.
Sadly, this effect happens to all large companies. They stop innovating. They instead focus on shoring up their stock and capital to keep investors happy, lowering risk, and start focusing on acquisitions to bring in new ideas and new blood. Intel is no different than any other company.
There is a solution: skunkworks new ideas. Throw time, effort, money, and brainpower at innovation, with NO guarantee of returns. Then, when new products are created, don't squash them under a controlling corporate culture. Let them grow internally, with support. Intrapreneurship does not look at org charts or worry about the bottom line as much as the next 5 years.
Welcome to commoditization.
Do I get to open up a can of Whoop Ass on Ballmer for making me buy PCs with Windows? He's robbing from me!
Come to think of it, after seeing "Dance Monkey Boy," I see that his kung fu is quite strong. I doubt though that he could defend against my Iron Developer Technique!
We might be a step in the grand evolution, but so are ferns, moss, fungi, evergreens, ants, bees. Everything around today is the next step in grand evolution, regardless of its intelligence, awareness, or bra size. Humans are no more exquisite than whales, bonobos, or lemurs. We all are the result of the evolutionary process, and right now, we all are successful result to that process. Humans have NO favor or sway. To consider it any other way is hubris.
Not all of us want to live under rocks. There are many good productions on TV; the issues revolve around their delivery.
I see TV becoming more akin to books, that is any place, any time delivery systems of information. What really does that mean:
That does not imply for all the fearmongers out there widespread copying etc. There are ways to make this vision work, but it has to be openly embraced by producers and distributors, not fought tooth and nail. All they need to actually look around. TV is starting to work this way, but because of people wanting it this way, not because of the producers' efforts. It's the reality of TiVos, downloading the media to your PSP to watch on a plane, or torrenting an episode that you might have missed (because the bastards pre-empted my coverage for some news crap I did not even care about).
That's the new reality. Green eggs and ham.
It is incredibly difficult to produce a "market" leader measure without some consideration to the way that the market is measured. Fundamentally, that method determines the leader. Consider the obvious:
The market measure should be considered a dubious statistic, much like a political one. Raising the overall spending on education means nothing. Raising the overall spending per student, that means something. If you raise overall spending per student in constant dollars (inflation adjusted dollars), now you are really producing an accurate measure. The fact that most people can't understand basic comparisons--read the book Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos--leads to this fallacy of a measurement.
Even though I have a discount for the price of my current Xbox for the new one (one reason to get a decent warranty), I'm waiting until later this year to make the move. I'm not a wild fan of Xbox, and I do not see any major reason to upgrade. The real games I like (HL2, etc.) are still available on the Xbox. The 2 just seems like additional capability for the future, but not the present. Any one else waiting?
I have a bank account with a UK bank, and over there (I'm a US citizen) to use their web site, you have to have additional information. For me, I have to provide:
- a membership number
- a secret word (they ask for letters or numbers from the secret word)
- a passcode
- an account number
It takes several forms, but I don't have yet a third bulky RSA key to carry around.
How about just have people answer 10 questions and then use 3 of those answers, things like, your favorite color (blue, no green), car color (fun for those who do not have a car), or favorite movie. Stuff that no db keeps.
Just a thought.
ADA should apply to any web site the government puts together that cannot be declared protected in this War on Terrorism. But then, we all know that the terrorists hate our way of life, so they will hate us helping each other. Thus, I expect rampant attacks to start any day now. Not like the good old American criminals setting up bogus contribution sites, no, these attacks will be merciless. They will fill out forms for dead people, moo ha ha ha!
to anything that has weapons potential, I'm all for it. What fool would give a child a gun? No one. So why connect a new AI computer system, modelling a human brain, to weapons? Crap, keep it off the grid entirely, until we are certain it's not insane or sociopathic.
Would the government, especially this one which is even loathe to open their fly to take a piss, be likely to just create an open test? Then, regardless of what performs and how it's designed, as long as it demonstrates it means the Government Authorization Test, it's good in Uncle Sam's eyes. Even more diabolical would be the idea that by opening the code to such devices, there are DRM issues associated. Could they be sneaky enough to link the DMCA into this decision, issuing a counter-claim against the judges for issuing their ruling? Devious minds think alike...
Sure, as a former Chief Architect at Lotus and IBM, I may be biased . . . but I actually knew how to use Notes. Every time someone complained about Notes, it was not Notes they were complaining about. They were complaining about some crappy Notes DB that was so poorly designed that it worked horribly. Put a bug tracking system in Notes; good for under several hundred bugs. Anything more, and you can't do it easily. As for Apache/PHP/SQL, sure, you could reproduce what you could do in Notes, to a point. But, it would cost you A LOT MORE, and you would never get off-line capabilities. Something those of us on plane trips always appreciated. So, don't complain about the technology when you should be complaining about the implementation. Notes was good for certain things. RDBMSs are good at other things. Each has their strengths and weaknesses. But don't confuse the two. Notes is not a transaction system, and despite the hype, BLOB support still sucks under RDBMSs.
Since MS made an investment, Groove became more and more of a MS-centric tool. It acquired presence technology, but only using Messenger. It integrated into Outlook, but nothing else. It published information to Sharepoint. And the development environment was nothing but COM objects from here as long as the eye could see. It saddens me that Groove did not make a real P2P collaboration platform, providing a platform independent object layer via specifications. The end result was a Windows-only collaboration platform that business purchase but never really knew what to do with.
Just like you don't use Oracle to handle a simple little db holding some responses to a recent questionnaire or for a quick little conference, I would not use MySQL for a big data warehouse or SAP deployment. Silly db admins have gotten it into their head that DBs at all levels should be compared equally. That is simply not true. Use what's appropriate where it's appropriate. Don't use C for a quick data analysis tool (try Excel first), and don't develop full enterprise apps using cobbled together MS-Office solutions.
I can buy into this argument. Thus, from it, we get global connectivity but not global access. OTOH, all our network coding/decoding now has to undergo considerable overhead. Is the change in philosophy worth the cost? I wonder.
I have found that if you mix vendor implementations of security--NetGear, Dell's wireless internal card, Linksys cards--they often do not work with encryption enabled. I have tried going up to 128bit, down to 64/40bit, setting NIC restrictions and the like, but in the end, it often is just fruitless with encryption. So, I usually just keep NIC restrictions on. Some hope from the random attacker, but no real protection.
If you want us to use security, make it simple. Make is to that I can type in a phrase for EVERY implementation, and that it generates acceptable keys. I don't want to type in a phrase for one vendor, and then have to hack out what the keys are for another. Then, just make it work. I don't want any one vendors card different than any other. When I use a Base-T cable, it works, regardless of vendor. That's what we want, folks.
When you can't compete, FUD.
The gauntlet is thrown down. I challenge this man to come up with a demonstrable "trojan horse" in an OS piece of software that cannot be found in a reasonable period of time by a security audit (the kind the government does of OS software to be used). Such fear mongering should be laughed at with, torn up, and spit upon whenever you see or hear it. It reminds me of Ridge getting up and saying, well, there's a threat around the election, but we have no evidence of it. Be scared (and vote for Bush). Yea . . . right. I didn't just fall off the turnip truck.
Get a life, and make better products, jerk!
for taking me to a place that sadly I will never be able to go. Growing up on sci-fi, Star Trek, and Space 1999, I dreampt of standing on Titan's shores. Now I know a bit more about what is really there. So, from one explorer born about 500 years too early, I just extend my thanks to the Cassini team. Congratulations, and keep the science coming!
Why do I use Gentoo? For the simple fact that I kept bumping into RPMs that needed to be recompiled. Heck, if I'm going to recompile RPMs, I might as well just go for the source, where I can tell it I don't certain features (like OSS support, etc.). Gentoo also taught me a lot more about my system, since you do have to know more to get it going. If you think that you can just "emerge world", sadly, sometimes, it does not work.
As for the eMachines comment, well, if termos wants to "whip it out", let's just compare workstations...I've got a dual P4 2.8 GHz with 4GB RAM, an SATA array with 500 GB of hard drive space, 2 ATI 9800 (one AGP, one PCI) with 2 21" LCDs and 1 20" LCD, an Audigy 2 ZS Platinum Pro (just installed), running 2.6.6 with mm patches. Gentoo handles it just fine, and I guarantee it blows past any off-the-shelf RPM distro. Why? Because I upgraded it from SuSE; it's considerably faster, and I've never looked back.
So, please don't talk about what you may not really use or know. To each his own. That's the real value of Open Source.
Let's not all go blind ogling, shall we?
Oh well, I just want British TV.
Hey, ITV, when are you going to step up to the crease? Huh?!
If it doesn't, I'm going to set up a home-made video box over there just to record stuff, so that I can download it to my PC. "Footballers' Wives", here I come.
Consider the oldest stories, like the Indian epic the Mahabharata or the Greek's Iliad. It's not about the wars or conflicts. It's about the interplay between people. It's always been about the context of the people. We as people want to see other people experiencing things.
Now, look at the lastest successful sci-fi, IMHO Babylon 5. Sure, they made space fighting a lot more realistic. But it was the story of the Shadows vs. the Vorlons, Sheridan's heroic sacrifice on Z'ha'dum, and the betrayal of Garibaldi. Really, look at this summary about the conflict:
Little here talks about science, the reality of evolution, or the underlying science. It's about philosophy, life, and the questions we all encounter along our own life. That's the story, and that's what made it more interesting than any show about cool tools. It's never been about the tools. They just get us to start watching. It's always been about the relationships, whether we want to admit it or not.In my old days, I once had an Apple IIci running AUX. Inside that system, I ran the Macintosh app Virtual PC. (At least I think that was it's name, but that was a long time ago . . . a long long time ago ... 1993) Inside of Virtual PC, I installed DOS 6.22. Then, low and behold, I boot up Windows 3.11. At the time, it was the most convoluted way to run Windows, but it worked. Slowly. Very very slowly. But it worked.