I was immediately reminded of that very strange story (but all of his stories were very strange) by J.G. Ballard - The Crystal World (1966) - where this sort of thing was mysteriously occurring on its own in a jungle somewhere in Cameroon.
My first thought was that Skynet was making its move here. But aside from that (as troubling as it may well be), are the microsatellites otherwise functioning all right? That is, are they doing what they are (officially) supposed to be doing? Just curious.
Starting off with AOL for the last three months of '96, I briefly tried and quickly abandoned Inept Exploder, going with Netscape for the balance of the old century and into the new, passing through Windows 3.1, 95 and 98 on my way to various flavors of Linux. About 8 years ago a friend helped me set up a NetBSD box for my intarwebz usage, insisting I try Seamonkey - and I have been using it with some satisfaction since. My current rather dodgy setup (inb4 "get a better setup", I have a couple of candidate boxen that I'm working on, but money for parts is tight), which doesn't run anywhere as well as I would like, handles Seamonkey 2.8 rather well, and certainly better than the current version of Firefox - a beast that can hardly be said to run at all and frequently locks the system so hard I am forced to physically shut the computer off entirely. Seamonkey's bookmark manager is amazingly good, while Firefox... doesn't seem to have a bookmark manager of any kind. My chief complaint against Seamonkey is the problem arising from an update that so totally broke several plugins involved with flash video (such as YouTube) that I have been unable to repair them.
(background music: Lightwave's "Tycho Brahe.")
I seldom have much occasion to post here, especially as I'd probably wind up unread at the bottom of a zillion earlier posts (which I haven't read), but...OK...
The reason I am still on dialup is because I can't fscking afford broadband. I have occasional access to broadband when I happen to visit my ISP, so I know what I'm missing. Make it affordable and available and see what happens then.
I suspect its DRM is pretty good - not unbreakable, but still. Whether it's actually desireable in another question. The original SV is the result, as has been pointed out elsewhere here, of the coming together of too many different factors that are unlikely, under ordinary conditions, to re-occur; attempting to artificially recreate this doesn't seem likely to lead to anything like the same thing.
Hm, let's try this: compare Silicon Valley at its height with Warner Brothers' cartoon studios ("Termite Terrace") at its height, during the 1940s, a half-century earlier.
Anyone can read about it in any number of books on the subject. In any case, there was a fair number of attempts in a number of other, lesser studios to recreate their product without being able to recreate the environment that made it possible, with drastically variable results.
Another example is the late, somewhat lamented Indian Motocycle Company, which has been brought to life more times than Frankenstein's monster, only to die after a startlingly short imitation of life. A dreadful waste of money and energy that could go into creating an American rival to Harley-Davidson (dream on;P ).
Damn it's late here. Let's wrap it up: IMHO it's sometimes better to make something new than to try to make a copy of something that you don't entirely understand. Or something like that. Good night, nurse.
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I was immediately reminded of that very strange story (but all of his stories were very strange) by J.G. Ballard - The Crystal World (1966) - where this sort of thing was mysteriously occurring on its own in a jungle somewhere in Cameroon.
My first thought was that Skynet was making its move here. But aside from that (as troubling as it may well be), are the microsatellites otherwise functioning all right? That is, are they doing what they are (officially) supposed to be doing? Just curious.
Starting off with AOL for the last three months of '96, I briefly tried and quickly abandoned Inept Exploder, going with Netscape for the balance of the old century and into the new, passing through Windows 3.1, 95 and 98 on my way to various flavors of Linux. About 8 years ago a friend helped me set up a NetBSD box for my intarwebz usage, insisting I try Seamonkey - and I have been using it with some satisfaction since. My current rather dodgy setup (inb4 "get a better setup", I have a couple of candidate boxen that I'm working on, but money for parts is tight), which doesn't run anywhere as well as I would like, handles Seamonkey 2.8 rather well, and certainly better than the current version of Firefox - a beast that can hardly be said to run at all and frequently locks the system so hard I am forced to physically shut the computer off entirely. Seamonkey's bookmark manager is amazingly good, while Firefox ... doesn't seem to have a bookmark manager of any kind. My chief complaint against Seamonkey is the problem arising from an update that so totally broke several plugins involved with flash video (such as YouTube) that I have been unable to repair them.
(background music: Lightwave's "Tycho Brahe.")
I seldom have much occasion to post here, especially as I'd probably wind up unread at the bottom of a zillion earlier posts (which I haven't read), but...OK ...
The reason I am still on dialup is because I can't fscking afford broadband. I have occasional access to broadband when I happen to visit my ISP, so I know what I'm missing. Make it affordable and available and see what happens then.
Hm, let's try this: compare Silicon Valley at its height with Warner Brothers' cartoon studios ("Termite Terrace") at its height, during the 1940s, a half-century earlier. Anyone can read about it in any number of books on the subject. In any case, there was a fair number of attempts in a number of other, lesser studios to recreate their product without being able to recreate the environment that made it possible, with drastically variable results.
Another example is the late, somewhat lamented Indian Motocycle Company, which has been brought to life more times than Frankenstein's monster, only to die after a startlingly short imitation of life. A dreadful waste of money and energy that could go into creating an American rival to Harley-Davidson (dream on ;P ).
Damn it's late here. Let's wrap it up: IMHO it's sometimes better to make something new than to try to make a copy of something that you don't entirely understand. Or something like that. Good night, nurse.