I actually think that Enterprise is a good show, but that it could have been great. I like the realisticly clunky technology, the fact that crew members will, after months in a high pressure life/death environment, wind up in the sack with each other. I like that the Vulcans are shown to be like any other great power, full of ambition, imperialism, rivalries and dark secrets. I like how grim, angry decisions have to be made that screw over others for the sake of the ship or Earth.
Earth in Enterprise is like Japan in the early 1900s. Japan was surrounded by much larger, parternalistic/hostile powers. The ruling clique decided that Japan would seize its place under the sun and did so. Such is the same in the Star Trek universe. At the start, Earth was a backward, vaguely radioactive, dead-end place. Our first starship was cobbled together from the last stages of a pre-war project and launched on top of a modified ICBM. 500 or so years later, Vulcans, Klingons and all the rest have been made members of a Federation of Planets with its capital in San Francisco.
Unfortunately, the writing of the Enterprise just failed to make exciting the period when Earth first reached out to control its part of the galaxy. It was a great disappointment.
I really realized this after watching Battlestar Galactica.
Although that show has flaws (the modern Colonial Vipers and Battlestars have no manual controls or override if the central computer goes down? Such a stupid design decision would just never happen. Unlike an F16, which is a brick in the airstream without its computer control, spaceships fly in space and so could be controlled manually quite easily - if not elegantly - if need be), the writing is leagues better than Enterprise and the dark, angry story is as believable as SF can be. They even (almost) have rocketships that don't go "whish" in a vacuum, and the lasers, missiles, etc. are also pretty much silent. There is no happy resolution, such as with that passenger liner (I won't spoil it for those who haven't seen the episode), or when the FTL equipped half of the refugee fleet flees last season, leaving the rest to get nuked.
I agree with the idea of a centrally managed environment controlled by ISPs. This would be perfect for older users, average non-tech users and children. If I was a parent, for instance, it would be great if our home PC was as managed in terms of software installs, web-sites that could be visited, etc. as our PCs at work.It would be especially good to have the system alert me if my children were sending e-mails or IMs involving sexual and/or illegal content with strangers on the net. My father virus infects himself about once a month, no matter how many times I warn about going to dodgy sites. I set up Firefox, but, somehow, he (and my mother) always find their way back to Internet Explorer no matter how hard I try and hide it.
Of course, such a system would need an opt out provision. I would not want my own personal use PC to be managed by anyone other than myself. I can imagine that when my kids got to a certain age they'd be allowed to use the "adults computer". I'd also be sure to make sure that, if my son or daughter developed an interest early on in IT and PCs other than just IM or music downloads that I'd give them access to an opt-out machine. Even with the risk of their being exposed to the dark side of the net, I feel it would be more important that they have a fully functional tool available to build their knowledge, if computers were their thing.
Some will say that the best way to control your kids internet access is to watch your kids. I agree, but, realistically, with the schedules we follow today combined with the nefariousness of the average teen boy in terms of finding ways to see naked chicks, dead people, etc., having the IT department of my ISP keep an eye on things would be a real blessing. Having the system prevent them from installing god knows what virus ridden dreck from the internet would save endless time spent in restoring systems, reformatting hard-drives, etc.
With the MPAA/RIAA lawsuites flying everywhere, as a potential parent, the last thing I want to find in my mailbox is a demand for hundreds of thousands of dollars because my daughter downloaded a Britany Spears song or two. (I blackly hate the RIAA but, as one guy on a budget, if they come after me, they win.) I know the risks and no ways to protect myself when using p2p networks, an average 10 year old, or an average 70 year old (my father just loves downloading movies) won't have a clue.
I completely disagree with the gist of this article. On-line game playing, reading and responding to e-mails, IM, etc. are forms of socializing, much more than staring blindly at the TV. My family lives overseas; with IM and e-mail, I communicate with them at a much more constant, intense, intimate level now than when I was a kid sitting around the family room with us all in the same house. In those days, we'd all wind up veged in front of the TV paying more attention to it than each other. As for friends, I'll always have one or two or more long running IM chats going, sometimes they heat up, other times they do quiet for a while but I am socially in contact with different people all day, instead of just a few minutes on the phone. Also, the article doesn't even mention that, while doing stuff on the net, I (and most people I know) have the TV droning on in the background anyway.
I notice that several people have replied that Well Fargo works just fine with Firefox. In a way, this proves my point. On my system and on those of lots of people I know, it does not work. (And, I mean using the site to access and manipulate account info and details, not just to read their agitprop.)
However, with IE, Wells Fargo's site works for everyone all of the time. For Firefox to really jump out and dominate, there shouldn't be any question about whether the browser might or might not work with such and such a site.
Firefox is an utterly superior product and annoying glitches such as this give it an unfair rep with ordinary users.
Expanding on the idea of the Active X plugin, how about an "IE Gorp" plugin that, for specific user selected sites, takes into account not only Active X, but all of the other non-standard and sundry crud IE fosts upon us?
As sacreligious as it is, I think Firefox should have a plugin that allows Active X to run, but set-up so that only certain URLs as provided by the user allow this. (I know that several "non-official" solutions exist, but these are fiddly and hard to set-up, especially for ordinary users.
As much as I hate IE and the security nightmare it creates, the sad fact is that for banks, other financial institutions and coporate intranets, ActiveX and other IE gorp can't be avoided.
It sucks to introduce people to Firefox, have them all impressed and then get a call that they can't get through to their Wells Fargo account (if any IT people from Well Fargo are reading this, get a clue. Your bank is one of the biggest in Silicon Valley and the fact that you persist in being IE centric is pissing a lot of your customers off).
Company intranets are a hopeless case. Considering the bureaucratic, pin headed phb mentality behind most corporate IT departments, it will years (if ever) before company intranets are adapted for non-IE browsers. The only even partial solution to gain Firefox type features in this case is to use Maxthon, and that still leaves the door wide open security wise.
My company has a "managed desktop" environment as well. However, applications that don't impact the registry can install. I installed Mozilla months ago and it works perfectly. (I haven't tried Firefox at work because Mozilla does the job fine. I do use Firefox at home, though) The only issue I have found is with Adblocker where I have to manually enter block codes as the right click method won't work. Unfortunately, at home and at work, I still have to go back to Internet Explorer for my bank and the company intranet because these only work with IE.
integrate this web-site into your program somehow:
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/wwwjdic.html
I'm not attached to it formally in anyway. But, using the Breen site above, I basically taught myself to read advanced Japanese in a year. It even has open sourced ideals built in, people can submit new words and correct entries.
Well, with wireless internet and a headset/microphone and Skype, you have the equivalent of a cell phone anyway. Some of the newest things coming out are "phones" that are basically wireless netportals that use Skype or something like it to let people make calls. It is going to be interesting when someone pulls one of these out on a plane, gets told he can't use cell phones and then tries to explain to the highschool drop out IQ 75 stewardness that the phone isn't really phone even though it rings, you can call out and receive calls on it...
sadly, I work in a major high tech oriented law firm. Yep, non-technical people really don't know anything about IT stuff, and I'm not being condescending. It is just the truth from what I see everyday, all day long. They really really think that the big blue "E" on the desktop means "the Internet" and nothing will convince them otherwise.
I'm always asked to help clean up friends computers, get rid of spyware, adware, etc. What I always do is download Firefox (along with Adblocker) and then go through the whole system and change all of the Firefox icons to IE icons. (I also set them up with a good filter for Adblocker) The real IE shortcut I dump in the trash and delete. I then tell my non-tech friends that "I fixed the internet" so that they won't see ads, won't get popups and will be much more protected against spyware. If I feel someone might actually understand what I did, I tell them. Always, a few days later, I get e-mails, calls, etc. about how great the "Internet" is working and more referrals to fix on other folks PCs. Of course, sadly, IE still lurks behind every open window, so it can't be gotten rid of completely.
"Bluyins" is a real word. Just go to google and type in "bluyins" and a whole bunch of Spanish pages come up all about blue jeans, some with the translation to English as "blue jeans". Nothing comes up in images, so maybe the word isn't universal, but lots of text only pages with it do exist.
This company will be sued to death pretty soon. (Calling it an "extension cord" they way do is a good try, but, basically, no...) However, the MPAA/networks will only have a quick reprieve.
In the next few years, network bandwidth will be so high that people will be able to send TV broadcasts over their ordinary internet connections with bog standard equipment either as a stream or as an e-mail attachment.
There will be so much bandwidth available that people's ISPs won't even notice millions of people sending the Superbowl to their work PC halfway around the world.
The media companies will just have to learn to adjust to a world where we get our entertainment the way we want it, when we want it.
As with the ipod and Apple's music store vs. Kazaa, people will pay for a convenient solution that fits our active moder
The RIAA and MPAA should enjoy these last few years when they can try and control people's entertainment choices.
The only reason that they can reach out and sue people, etc. is that inorder to obtain media, one has to connect to a set service such as kazaa, etc. and so leave an IP address behind. No matter how advanced the P2P service, there's is always a way to find the downloader if they really really want to.
At present, it is not realistic to e-mail songs, movies, and TV shows because the attachments are too big for normal e-mail accounts to handle and too large for most PCs to deal with without crashing.
At my work, every now and then, some idiot tries to e-mail a bunch of MP3s to himself or a whole movie and our entire e-mail system goes butts up. Even so, recently, the instead of dying when this happens, the files do get through but at the cost of drastically slowing down the system instead of killing it as was the case a year ago.
But, in the next few years, e-mail attachments of a gig or more won't be a problem or even significant and PCs will be running multi-gig processors. E-mailing your buddy the latest Enterprise episode will be be trivial. Remember how, a few years back, even just sending a large jpg would tax your system?
It is easy to image P2P "networks" consisting of anomymous google e-mail accounts or the like, and this would be the most simplistic method. Between creative use of e-mail and networks of friends exchanging things, we might in the next couple of years finally be able to kill of the MPAA/RIAA dinosaurs once and for all.
The main thing, in my mind, holding back e-book adoption is that you can't take them in the can or into bath-tub safely. This is where I do 90% of my entertainment reading and I think a lot of people have the same habits.
However, there is a new chemical that has just been released by a company called P2i in England, which is a joint venture between a VC firm (Cirrus, I think) and the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory. From their website, the coating (as yet un-named, it seems) is described as "an invisible ultra-thin polymer coating where water beads up on a surface like mercury, protecting the material or device it has been applied to."
It sounds like snake oil, I admit. However, I saw it demonstrated on Japanese TV late last week. The announcer had a normal, non-water proof, not special in any way laptop, TV and cell phone coated with the stuff. He then dunked the above electronics into a big tank while they were on. Everything worked perfectly in the water and when he took them back out. They also coated a newspaper with it, and it didn't get wet at all when put into the water. He took a glass of water and spilled on the laptop and it kept on working just fine.
I'm not sure where it is in terms of approvals, etc. in the West although the P2i is planning to market the material soon, their site says. The Japanese National Fire Department is in the process of approving the material for sale now.
This will, I think, make e-books much more useful and practical. For me, a book, while not exactly disposable, is something that I don't mind if it gets wet, etc. It will dry out and be fine. I just never feel comfortable having expensive electronics anywhere near the bathroom or moisture. Existing waterproofed products in the thick yellow coating or in the special bags are clumsy to use and kind of annoying to deal with.
Although I am very much a StarTrek fan, I have never understood why it is so important that every movie, episode and series mesh so well with all the others.
We fans have to realize that when the writers generated the orginal stories back in the 1960s, they had to take into mind the current politics in the US, what advertisers wanted, what the network wanted, what budget they had, last seasons ratings, etc.
Every subsequent installment of StarTrek has to deal with this. For example, some fans complain about the Klingon's faces changing. Back in the 60s, it was either impossible or would have cost way too much to have full face costumes that wouldn't face looked fake or stupid. Or what about that really stupid episode where Kirk and et. al. find some planet full of American Indians who worship the US flag or something? I think we'd all agree that one ought to be dropped out of the story arc.
Another thing is StarFleet itself. The 60s show had a mostly all white, crew-cut, "Right Stuff", NASA with bigger ships ethic. Women went around in mini-skirts bringing coffee. No problem with the miniskirts for me... However, a show or movie with that kind of environment just wouldn't make it in these PC times. Half of the potential audience would be offended by it and advertisers would definitely keep well away.
I'm not sure why people hate Enterprise so much. To me, it seems reasonably "realistic" as to how things would be on a small ship like that in close quarters months at a time. People argue, have fights, boink a lot, things don't work right, things stink, people make bad decisions, etc. It isn't a perfect show, of course, because, again, it has to conform to ratings, what is "PC" at the time, etc. (There's still the problem of how everyone in the entire universe happens to speak perfect English all the time... but all SF shows have that problem, especially StarGate. But that's a different rant... and an unavoidable problem without out making actors playing aliens have to emit nonsense phrases with sub-titles, which would be like watching some obscure East European art film or something.)
I view StarTrek as less of set series of stories than a generally close, but not always connected series of tales. In the future, with better, cheaper effects it might be possible to take the old StarTrek episodes, run them though a PC and make them look like they have whatever the latest in effects can do and maybe even adjust the plots to create a more unified set of stories.
There's no cache option (yet). That's the feature I love most about Google, how I can get the information I want matter if a site has been taken down or is on some balky, slow server somewhere.
On an aside, the ulitimate combination would be in Google would buy Archive.org and you would be able to get a historical cache of every site on the web from the very beginning.
Also, I will find if very very hard to ever trust Microsoft to give me real, unbiased, un-pre-purchased search results. Google is equally a stockowner owned, megacorp, but (so far) they have shown a spirit of remaining honest and aboveboard. Microsoft definitely does not have this kind of rep...
The only magazine I really have to read is the Economist. I find the articles in depth, inciteful and like how the magazine concentrates on not not just the US but also acknowleges the existence of the rest of the world. There is a definite, openly admitted, free-market, right wingish tinge to the reporting, but it isn't poured on in gops and the other sides' opinions are given fair say.
Time, Newsweek, etc. have utterly degraded into rah-rah rags for the ruling clique in Washington and their meaningless wars and wag-the-dog endless yellow alerts along with feel good fluff articles for the Atkins Diet/Crispy Cream/Oprah/Jesus Freak/Jerry Springer crowd. It is sad seeing how these magazines used to do real reporting and serious journalism in the 50's and 60s and have now become little more than (low quality) parakeet cage lining.
I use Skype over my wireless home network via a cruddy 4 year old laptop with a no-name wireless card and the cheapest Linksys wireless router I could find. I connect to the internet using SprintBroadband, a kind of wireless DSL that's beamed to users via a big antenna. Even with two wireless links, I get a perfect connection 99% of the time. While on Skype, I can surf ordinary news, etc. sites fine. Trying to play a video at the same, admittedly, will be system slow to a crawl..
Of course, the new technology will have glitches. I may just be lucky. However, I think the story submitter pronounces wireless VOIP dead far too early. If, at this early date in the life of the technology, a Mickey Mouse set-up like mine can work, then the future for serious, enterprise level applications seems bright.
Autopr0n is one of my favorite porn sites. Being able to comment on the pics is a cool feature that I've never seen on any other porn site. However, I always wondered how this site got adopted by slashdot? (Not complaining... I like the site.)I know that thousands of porn sites would love to get their links on slashdot without getting modded down to nothing.
This still doesn't answer why the US is so backwards in mobile. There's no reason why we couldn't have Japanese style mobile networks in the US in dense areas like Florida, New York or Chicago and just expand them out to the less populated areas as time goes on. (Even in Japan, in the far outlying areas, there are places without coverage).
Basically, US mobile companies and slow, lazy, inefficient and technologically backwards. They don't want to invest in new technology because they don't have to because they jointly control the market as a monopoly and the cost of entering fresh with new technology is way way too high.
In Japan now, you can have cell phones with four way video conferencing, TV, GPS and a function where you use the phone as an electronic wallet at the store or with vending machines.
Other than finding new ways to explode things in ever more violent ways, the US is slipping behind the curve. I'm no liberal and have nothing against blasting terrorists, etc. but we're going to have to concentrate on other things as well to keep ahead.
sort of an answer to your question. Like I said, most of these things are made by nameless companies from China, all probably sourcing off the same chips from other nameless companies in China. There are also some from the known brands, which just cost more and aren't different. Just buy the cheapest you see with the most storage... it should be OK from what my friends say. I've see 128mb for 30 bucks on sale.
As for reliability, mine has been stepped on, dropped on the sidewalk, had coke spilt on it, left in 100 degree heat and always worked perfectly. It doesn't even have a brand name and is made of that same cheap plastic they use for low quality toys. Even so, it works absolutely perfectly, even with my company's locked-down paranoid security desktops.
I saw on slashdot about a pen drive with a camera on it and heard about MP3 players. Those sound cool from a geeky standpoint but I'd hold off buying one for a couple of product generations.
Iomega is pretty muched doomed. Already at the local computer shops you can by a 1 gig pen drive for 300 bucks. This is way too expensive now, but this time next year the same drive will be 50 bucks and it will be 300 bucks for the 10 gig pen drive, all made by nameless companies in China somewhere.
With a pen drive, you don't need a driver, don't need cables and just connect it to anything running Windows 98 or above with a USB port. (not sure about Linux or Apple). I have a 64mb one I use everywhere all the time, at work, home, at Kinkos. It is the best storage medium I've ever used.
The price to get really decent storage is still too high, but drops exponentially every couple of months.
Even if Iomega sells these drives (they might), there's no way they can compete with the Chinese companies which don't have the huge infrastructure, thousands of employees, marketing costs, etc.
So your alternative is to accept the odd germ attack, mini-nuke or chemical bomb as the price of preserving our ancient liberties?
In the abstract, I can almost agree, from a philosphical point of view. I'm not being facetious. 200 years of liberty is something precious.
But then I look at it from the perspective of a mother with no more eyes holding her screaming baby with no more eyes. That's a scene the British just barely prevented.
Could you tell her face-to-face that the attack was worth it so as to protect the constitution? I could just about start the discussion but I don't think I could go through with it.
I also feel worried about loss of privacy. I don't like the way our liberties are being eroded. However, I can't see any other alternative considering the times we live in.
However, in a world where groups of intelligent, dedicated men work long hours planning to randomly kill innocent civilians for the joy of it, thank God for the NSA, Ashcroft, the Patriot Act and all the rest.
That chemical was designed to melt out people's eyes and skin.
We should be really thankful for Excel. I used to live in Tokyo and used to have a Japanese wife. One day, she goes to work, not in a typical Japanese OL outfit but in old jeans and a faded blouse. I ask why she is she doing that? (In Japan, everyone always goes everywhere perfectly dressed, especially to work). She says that they have to work on the spreadsheet. "Spreadsheet" in Japan at that time (10 or so years ago) meant a big room covered with paper with tiny numbers on it. Legions of Japanese girls crawl over it, changing and adding figures as directed by managers who walk in with the latest changes. This one company might have been just super old fashioned or something, but it was a major department stores with branches in all the major cities with New York and Singapore.
Slashdot Mirror
Earth in Enterprise is like Japan in the early 1900s. Japan was surrounded by much larger, parternalistic/hostile powers. The ruling clique decided that Japan would seize its place under the sun and did so. Such is the same in the Star Trek universe. At the start, Earth was a backward, vaguely radioactive, dead-end place. Our first starship was cobbled together from the last stages of a pre-war project and launched on top of a modified ICBM. 500 or so years later, Vulcans, Klingons and all the rest have been made members of a Federation of Planets with its capital in San Francisco.
Unfortunately, the writing of the Enterprise just failed to make exciting the period when Earth first reached out to control its part of the galaxy. It was a great disappointment. I really realized this after watching Battlestar Galactica.
Although that show has flaws (the modern Colonial Vipers and Battlestars have no manual controls or override if the central computer goes down? Such a stupid design decision would just never happen. Unlike an F16, which is a brick in the airstream without its computer control, spaceships fly in space and so could be controlled manually quite easily - if not elegantly - if need be), the writing is leagues better than Enterprise and the dark, angry story is as believable as SF can be. They even (almost) have rocketships that don't go "whish" in a vacuum, and the lasers, missiles, etc. are also pretty much silent. There is no happy resolution, such as with that passenger liner (I won't spoil it for those who haven't seen the episode), or when the FTL equipped half of the refugee fleet flees last season, leaving the rest to get nuked.
Of course, such a system would need an opt out provision. I would not want my own personal use PC to be managed by anyone other than myself. I can imagine that when my kids got to a certain age they'd be allowed to use the "adults computer". I'd also be sure to make sure that, if my son or daughter developed an interest early on in IT and PCs other than just IM or music downloads that I'd give them access to an opt-out machine. Even with the risk of their being exposed to the dark side of the net, I feel it would be more important that they have a fully functional tool available to build their knowledge, if computers were their thing.
Some will say that the best way to control your kids internet access is to watch your kids. I agree, but, realistically, with the schedules we follow today combined with the nefariousness of the average teen boy in terms of finding ways to see naked chicks, dead people, etc., having the IT department of my ISP keep an eye on things would be a real blessing. Having the system prevent them from installing god knows what virus ridden dreck from the internet would save endless time spent in restoring systems, reformatting hard-drives, etc.
With the MPAA/RIAA lawsuites flying everywhere, as a potential parent, the last thing I want to find in my mailbox is a demand for hundreds of thousands of dollars because my daughter downloaded a Britany Spears song or two. (I blackly hate the RIAA but, as one guy on a budget, if they come after me, they win.) I know the risks and no ways to protect myself when using p2p networks, an average 10 year old, or an average 70 year old (my father just loves downloading movies) won't have a clue.
I completely disagree with the gist of this article. On-line game playing, reading and responding to e-mails, IM, etc. are forms of socializing, much more than staring blindly at the TV. My family lives overseas; with IM and e-mail, I communicate with them at a much more constant, intense, intimate level now than when I was a kid sitting around the family room with us all in the same house. In those days, we'd all wind up veged in front of the TV paying more attention to it than each other. As for friends, I'll always have one or two or more long running IM chats going, sometimes they heat up, other times they do quiet for a while but I am socially in contact with different people all day, instead of just a few minutes on the phone. Also, the article doesn't even mention that, while doing stuff on the net, I (and most people I know) have the TV droning on in the background anyway.
However, with IE, Wells Fargo's site works for everyone all of the time. For Firefox to really jump out and dominate, there shouldn't be any question about whether the browser might or might not work with such and such a site.
Firefox is an utterly superior product and annoying glitches such as this give it an unfair rep with ordinary users.
Expanding on the idea of the Active X plugin, how about an "IE Gorp" plugin that, for specific user selected sites, takes into account not only Active X, but all of the other non-standard and sundry crud IE fosts upon us?
As much as I hate IE and the security nightmare it creates, the sad fact is that for banks, other financial institutions and coporate intranets, ActiveX and other IE gorp can't be avoided.
It sucks to introduce people to Firefox, have them all impressed and then get a call that they can't get through to their Wells Fargo account (if any IT people from Well Fargo are reading this, get a clue. Your bank is one of the biggest in Silicon Valley and the fact that you persist in being IE centric is pissing a lot of your customers off).
Company intranets are a hopeless case. Considering the bureaucratic, pin headed phb mentality behind most corporate IT departments, it will years (if ever) before company intranets are adapted for non-IE browsers. The only even partial solution to gain Firefox type features in this case is to use Maxthon, and that still leaves the door wide open security wise.
My company has a "managed desktop" environment as well. However, applications that don't impact the registry can install. I installed Mozilla months ago and it works perfectly. (I haven't tried Firefox at work because Mozilla does the job fine. I do use Firefox at home, though) The only issue I have found is with Adblocker where I have to manually enter block codes as the right click method won't work. Unfortunately, at home and at work, I still have to go back to Internet Explorer for my bank and the company intranet because these only work with IE.
integrate this web-site into your program somehow: http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/wwwjdic.html I'm not attached to it formally in anyway. But, using the Breen site above, I basically taught myself to read advanced Japanese in a year. It even has open sourced ideals built in, people can submit new words and correct entries.
Well, with wireless internet and a headset/microphone and Skype, you have the equivalent of a cell phone anyway. Some of the newest things coming out are "phones" that are basically wireless netportals that use Skype or something like it to let people make calls. It is going to be interesting when someone pulls one of these out on a plane, gets told he can't use cell phones and then tries to explain to the highschool drop out IQ 75 stewardness that the phone isn't really phone even though it rings, you can call out and receive calls on it ...
sadly, I work in a major high tech oriented law firm. Yep, non-technical people really don't know anything about IT stuff, and I'm not being condescending. It is just the truth from what I see everyday, all day long. They really really think that the big blue "E" on the desktop means "the Internet" and nothing will convince them otherwise.
I'm always asked to help clean up friends computers, get rid of spyware, adware, etc. What I always do is download Firefox (along with Adblocker) and then go through the whole system and change all of the Firefox icons to IE icons. (I also set them up with a good filter for Adblocker) The real IE shortcut I dump in the trash and delete. I then tell my non-tech friends that "I fixed the internet" so that they won't see ads, won't get popups and will be much more protected against spyware. If I feel someone might actually understand what I did, I tell them. Always, a few days later, I get e-mails, calls, etc. about how great the "Internet" is working and more referrals to fix on other folks PCs. Of course, sadly, IE still lurks behind every open window, so it can't be gotten rid of completely.
"Bluyins" is a real word. Just go to google and type in "bluyins" and a whole bunch of Spanish pages come up all about blue jeans, some with the translation to English as "blue jeans". Nothing comes up in images, so maybe the word isn't universal, but lots of text only pages with it do exist.
In the next few years, network bandwidth will be so high that people will be able to send TV broadcasts over their ordinary internet connections with bog standard equipment either as a stream or as an e-mail attachment.
There will be so much bandwidth available that people's ISPs won't even notice millions of people sending the Superbowl to their work PC halfway around the world.
The media companies will just have to learn to adjust to a world where we get our entertainment the way we want it, when we want it.
As with the ipod and Apple's music store vs. Kazaa, people will pay for a convenient solution that fits our active moder
The only reason that they can reach out and sue people, etc. is that inorder to obtain media, one has to connect to a set service such as kazaa, etc. and so leave an IP address behind. No matter how advanced the P2P service, there's is always a way to find the downloader if they really really want to.
At present, it is not realistic to e-mail songs, movies, and TV shows because the attachments are too big for normal e-mail accounts to handle and too large for most PCs to deal with without crashing.
At my work, every now and then, some idiot tries to e-mail a bunch of MP3s to himself or a whole movie and our entire e-mail system goes butts up. Even so, recently, the instead of dying when this happens, the files do get through but at the cost of drastically slowing down the system instead of killing it as was the case a year ago.
But, in the next few years, e-mail attachments of a gig or more won't be a problem or even significant and PCs will be running multi-gig processors. E-mailing your buddy the latest Enterprise episode will be be trivial. Remember how, a few years back, even just sending a large jpg would tax your system?
It is easy to image P2P "networks" consisting of anomymous google e-mail accounts or the like, and this would be the most simplistic method. Between creative use of e-mail and networks of friends exchanging things, we might in the next couple of years finally be able to kill of the MPAA/RIAA dinosaurs once and for all.
However, there is a new chemical that has just been released by a company called P2i in England, which is a joint venture between a VC firm (Cirrus, I think) and the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory. From their website, the coating (as yet un-named, it seems) is described as "an invisible ultra-thin polymer coating where water beads up on a surface like mercury, protecting the material or device it has been applied to."
It sounds like snake oil, I admit. However, I saw it demonstrated on Japanese TV late last week. The announcer had a normal, non-water proof, not special in any way laptop, TV and cell phone coated with the stuff. He then dunked the above electronics into a big tank while they were on. Everything worked perfectly in the water and when he took them back out. They also coated a newspaper with it, and it didn't get wet at all when put into the water. He took a glass of water and spilled on the laptop and it kept on working just fine.
I'm not sure where it is in terms of approvals, etc. in the West although the P2i is planning to market the material soon, their site says. The Japanese National Fire Department is in the process of approving the material for sale now.
This will, I think, make e-books much more useful and practical. For me, a book, while not exactly disposable, is something that I don't mind if it gets wet, etc. It will dry out and be fine. I just never feel comfortable having expensive electronics anywhere near the bathroom or moisture. Existing waterproofed products in the thick yellow coating or in the special bags are clumsy to use and kind of annoying to deal with.
We fans have to realize that when the writers generated the orginal stories back in the 1960s, they had to take into mind the current politics in the US, what advertisers wanted, what the network wanted, what budget they had, last seasons ratings, etc.
Every subsequent installment of StarTrek has to deal with this. For example, some fans complain about the Klingon's faces changing. Back in the 60s, it was either impossible or would have cost way too much to have full face costumes that wouldn't face looked fake or stupid. Or what about that really stupid episode where Kirk and et. al. find some planet full of American Indians who worship the US flag or something? I think we'd all agree that one ought to be dropped out of the story arc.
Another thing is StarFleet itself. The 60s show had a mostly all white, crew-cut, "Right Stuff", NASA with bigger ships ethic. Women went around in mini-skirts bringing coffee. No problem with the miniskirts for me ... However, a show or movie with that kind of environment just wouldn't make it in these PC times. Half of the potential audience would be offended by it and advertisers would definitely keep well away.
I'm not sure why people hate Enterprise so much. To me, it seems reasonably "realistic" as to how things would be on a small ship like that in close quarters months at a time. People argue, have fights, boink a lot, things don't work right, things stink, people make bad decisions, etc. It isn't a perfect show, of course, because, again, it has to conform to ratings, what is "PC" at the time, etc. (There's still the problem of how everyone in the entire universe happens to speak perfect English all the time ... but all SF shows have that problem, especially StarGate. But that's a different rant ... and an unavoidable problem without out making actors playing aliens have to emit nonsense phrases with sub-titles, which would be like watching some obscure East European art film or something.)
I view StarTrek as less of set series of stories than a generally close, but not always connected series of tales. In the future, with better, cheaper effects it might be possible to take the old StarTrek episodes, run them though a PC and make them look like they have whatever the latest in effects can do and maybe even adjust the plots to create a more unified set of stories.
On an aside, the ulitimate combination would be in Google would buy Archive.org and you would be able to get a historical cache of every site on the web from the very beginning.
Also, I will find if very very hard to ever trust Microsoft to give me real, unbiased, un-pre-purchased search results. Google is equally a stockowner owned, megacorp, but (so far) they have shown a spirit of remaining honest and aboveboard. Microsoft definitely does not have this kind of rep ...
Time, Newsweek, etc. have utterly degraded into rah-rah rags for the ruling clique in Washington and their meaningless wars and wag-the-dog endless yellow alerts along with feel good fluff articles for the Atkins Diet/Crispy Cream/Oprah/Jesus Freak/Jerry Springer crowd. It is sad seeing how these magazines used to do real reporting and serious journalism in the 50's and 60s and have now become little more than (low quality) parakeet cage lining.
Of course, the new technology will have glitches. I may just be lucky. However, I think the story submitter pronounces wireless VOIP dead far too early. If, at this early date in the life of the technology, a Mickey Mouse set-up like mine can work, then the future for serious, enterprise level applications seems bright.
Autopr0n is one of my favorite porn sites. Being able to comment on the pics is a cool feature that I've never seen on any other porn site. However, I always wondered how this site got adopted by slashdot? (Not complaining ... I like the site.)I know that thousands of porn sites would love to get their links on slashdot without getting modded down to nothing.
Basically, US mobile companies and slow, lazy, inefficient and technologically backwards. They don't want to invest in new technology because they don't have to because they jointly control the market as a monopoly and the cost of entering fresh with new technology is way way too high.
In Japan now, you can have cell phones with four way video conferencing, TV, GPS and a function where you use the phone as an electronic wallet at the store or with vending machines.
Other than finding new ways to explode things in ever more violent ways, the US is slipping behind the curve. I'm no liberal and have nothing against blasting terrorists, etc. but we're going to have to concentrate on other things as well to keep ahead.
As for reliability, mine has been stepped on, dropped on the sidewalk, had coke spilt on it, left in 100 degree heat and always worked perfectly. It doesn't even have a brand name and is made of that same cheap plastic they use for low quality toys. Even so, it works absolutely perfectly, even with my company's locked-down paranoid security desktops.
I saw on slashdot about a pen drive with a camera on it and heard about MP3 players. Those sound cool from a geeky standpoint but I'd hold off buying one for a couple of product generations.
With a pen drive, you don't need a driver, don't need cables and just connect it to anything running Windows 98 or above with a USB port. (not sure about Linux or Apple). I have a 64mb one I use everywhere all the time, at work, home, at Kinkos. It is the best storage medium I've ever used.
The price to get really decent storage is still too high, but drops exponentially every couple of months.
Even if Iomega sells these drives (they might), there's no way they can compete with the Chinese companies which don't have the huge infrastructure, thousands of employees, marketing costs, etc.
In the abstract, I can almost agree, from a philosphical point of view. I'm not being facetious. 200 years of liberty is something precious.
But then I look at it from the perspective of a mother with no more eyes holding her screaming baby with no more eyes. That's a scene the British just barely prevented.
Could you tell her face-to-face that the attack was worth it so as to protect the constitution? I could just about start the discussion but I don't think I could go through with it.
However, in a world where groups of intelligent, dedicated men work long hours planning to randomly kill innocent civilians for the joy of it, thank God for the NSA, Ashcroft, the Patriot Act and all the rest.
That chemical was designed to melt out people's eyes and skin.
We should be really thankful for Excel. I used to live in Tokyo and used to have a Japanese wife. One day, she goes to work, not in a typical Japanese OL outfit but in old jeans and a faded blouse. I ask why she is she doing that? (In Japan, everyone always goes everywhere perfectly dressed, especially to work). She says that they have to work on the spreadsheet. "Spreadsheet" in Japan at that time (10 or so years ago) meant a big room covered with paper with tiny numbers on it. Legions of Japanese girls crawl over it, changing and adding figures as directed by managers who walk in with the latest changes. This one company might have been just super old fashioned or something, but it was a major department stores with branches in all the major cities with New York and Singapore.