I spent my time under Clinton and Bush Jr as a 4067. That's a Computer Programmer in the Marine Corps. We had pretty solid gear available, decent servers, and a great network. One royal PITA though was the primary personel database was replicated out nightly from Kansas city. So any intra-base changes could take a full 24 hour window to propagate. Additionally, every 6 months we'd get someone new in charge of that database. And by "in charge" I mean a comitee, not a new DBA. And they would be compelled to rename half the tables and columns. Acronyms are good for 6 months, then all field names are typed in full, then we're down to 4 character codes, then into some strange "drop the vowels" campaign. ROYAL PITA.
As if that wasn't bad enough, in 2001 Bush and military leadership privatized the entire 4000 MOS field. 4066 (networkers) and 4067 (programmers) were lat moved to the 0600 MOSs (radio operators and field wiremen, along with some shunting to admin/clerical). So at the point I was heading out, we were going from a situation where Marines could review and make recommendations, to the point where purchasing decisions were almost entirely in the hands of private contractors.
It was removing just another cog in the machine to streamline the federal cash to corporate pockets process as the Foxes are now instructing the farmer on how to build a hen house.
The TSA should be cut immediately by 90%. Airport security should be left in the hands of the AIRPORTS, who wouldn't be wasting $370 million on this crap.
The TSA's role should be one of training, testing, and verifying. They should have a limited number of "secret shopper" agents that attempt to sneak weapons/bombs through the security check points to ensure that they are performing adiquetly. If an airport is failing to pass reasonable rates and is failing to improve, remove them from the "inside" network. Sure, you can still fly from there, but where ever you land you'll have to exit the terminal and re-enter through security.
Problem solved. You'll have the airports looking for the most effective and cheapest possible solution, the TSA to measure their performance, and we'll get rid of the back scatters AND fleecing of the US tax payers.
I fly for work, often internationally. I decline the backscatter and go for the grope. I figure if I'm going to have my 4th amendment rights violated, I'd rather have it done by a person than by a machine.
But I have had my penis groped. Not in the "back of the hand till it meets resistance" way either. Now, it probably wasn't intentional, either of the times it happened, but twice I have had TSA agents place that open palm on my penis. Twice I had a TSA agent pull my pants away from my body and look down the crack, one of those times the agent pulled both pants and underware to get the full money shot.
I'm sure there is a "right" method, but in my experience, the vast majority of TSA screening agents don't know what that is.
And I'm doubtful as to a "legal" method as current law requires that if you arrive at security, you can not leave with out being inspected, even if you decline the search and skip the flight. The TSA is a branch of the government, not a private company protecting private property. And this all sounds like a whole lot of Search and Seisure with out just cause. This doesn't even meet the requirement's of the "Stop and Frisk" ruling from SCOTUS.
If you are a bomber are you going to go to the airport and "hope" you don't get the explosives test?
And how many terrorist attacks has the TSA stopped since they instituted these changes?
Oh that's right: ZERO.
Everyone that has been attempted has made it past the TSA screening and only been stopped by the FBI, the people on the plane, and/or their own incompetence.
The TSA has a 0% success rate, why would a bomber be afraid of being caught? The TSA hasn't caught anyone, ever. I'd say the bomber has pretty good odds of getting through security.
The fact that untrained National Guardsmen were put into a prison guard position speaks to the total incompotence of the leadership.
I remember hearing this story break, and my response was "Well duh, what did they think would happen? Did they never hear of the Stanford project?"
These were part timers. They do one weekend a month, and a couple of weeks camping out in the summer. They don't have psych screening or extensive training in prison environments. They aren't professional soldiers. They are college kids, laborers, service industry pros. People who can't afford college or are looking for a little extra on the side. They aren't rich enough to do it on their own, and they aren't driven/desperate enough to go into the professional military. Not to knock on them, but really, the National Guard does NOT belong in foreign warzones or overseeing prisons.
old setups. With my archaic Pentium hooked up to a standard def rear projection, I'm capped at a pretty low resolution. The old system was sized such that I had to scroll the browser to see all of the titles on a line, the new system, I can scroll the titles with out having to scroll the browser. Way better experience, although I'd rather have a push button for scrolling than the current mouse hover (that's my big gripe about Boxee as well!)
Really though, if the old version had a 'low-res' version, it would have been just as good. It's pretty silly though, between HTML 5 and Silverlight, there is no reason for them to be using arbitrary screen resolutions for layout.
What is the mechanism that will rectify this? Zambian miners forming a union and demanding jobs at the Glory Hole in Alaska?
It's a bit of a wild idea and would have huge ramifications, but applying a COLA pegged labor adjustment tarrif on all imports could. If it take 10 man hours for a pound of sellable material, and the COLA in Zimbabwe was ~$10 US ($0.005/hr) compared to similar labor costs of $60,000 (~$30/hr) in the US, then the tarrif would be just shy of $300 per pound.
It would be a huge equalizing for as it would give international vendors a choice: Sell cheap, but pay a huge tarrif, or pay your employees comprable rates to the US labor force, and get no tarrif. The impact though, is that prices for cheap stuff in the US would skyrocket, and that international vendors would look at automating as much of their labor as possible.
I'm not sure if it would be a good idea, as it would have some huge ramifications, but I think it would be an interesting idea to have some economist debate over.
Consider it motivation for you, the tax payer, to pay attention to, or to become part of your local school board. Since most school funding is provided through property taxes, you DO have local control.
Imagine a M:tG game where you have your hand on your controler but you share the table with your opponent. Or a Clue! murder mistery, again with your own set of clues on your controler and the full board on display. Or an RPG with your character info and stats on your controler and the active game on the screen. Or a FF Strategies or Maden footbal style game where each player can control play selection, and possibly even FPS style game play on their control while the screen shows a typical football or kunfu movie interface.
I think there are definately uses for it, especially in multi-player and social atmospheres.
Not that I'm going to buy one, but it looks like there could be some action for it.
He warned the Brits in the same way I worn the people I play poker with that I'm about to take all their money... with a bluff. He didn't set out to warn the Brits. He was captured and saw an opportunity to gain freedom and buy time for the militias to assemble.
LOL, he didn't "Warn" them. He made up a bogus story to try to scare them. By claiming that there was a 500+ man strong militia defending Lexington, it forced the smaller forward units to double back to the main army and warn them (and slowing them down) and allowed Revere to go free and bought time for the rebels to assemble. The brits were walking a ~700 man army into the region, expecting little resistance. To find out that there was a 500+ strong militia defending their target would be a significant set back.
Paul Revere was playing poker, he bluffed, and his captors bought it. But to call that "warning" is just rediculous.
I have a pair just like them! And I think there may even be some scantly clad pictures of me out in the world. If it had shown up on MY twitter feed I would be hard pressed to unilaterally deny being the subject. I don't believe it was me, IIRC I wasn't wearing that pair of underware that night, but it could be a pic of me from years ago with the time stamp altered.
That last interview with Wolf Blitzer, it sounded like he was saying that there ARE pics like that of him, but he couldn't say if that was one of them nor how it got onto his twitter feed. There was a fair bit of tap dancing in his answers though, so who knows... more importantly, who cares?
Even the corporate/prift driven schools create a framework for innovation. I went to a tech college for a while. An interesting experience, but the non-teaching faculty was far more concerned with profit margins than education. And there were a lot of kids who skated by doing the bare minimum and they got crap for the money they paid.
But there were quite a few kids who took the opportunities to push themselves. To take the framework of the class and to seek out challenges. The same kids who could excell giving $100,000 to start a business are the same kids who are going to excell given a more free form college experience.
But lets face it, most freshman year colleges (be it voc or uni) are not "free form". They are ridgid, they are sitting in lecture halls, they are doing the rote work that isn't entertaining of challenging. Getting to the upper classes where there is more independence and the students are more mature, you see a whole different college experience. And this guy is recommending kid to bail, after they've completed the worst of it (IMO).
If they produce 480MWh each year. And 1 MWh sells for up to $200 in southern Cali, they should be able to generate revenues just shy of $100M per year. If they put the entirety of their revenues into loan repayment, that would have the loan paid off in 7 1/2 years.
Comparatively, the Darlington Nuclear Generating Station took 12 years and an inflation adjusted $22.6 billion dollars to build. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that $737M is a lot less than $22.6B.
It puts out roughly 23,000,000 MWh annually. Electric utilities are public in canada, but IF they were charging $200/MWh that's $4.6B/year in revenue. Applying 100% of the revenue to the construction loan, they would have it paid off in 5 years.
So yes, the construction costs can be paid off more quickly with a Nuclear system like Darlington, but the solar option would be about 1.5 times AS expensive than the nuclear option. And that is completely ignoring fuel stock, maintenance, payroll, and security. Of which I'm pretty sure that the solar system is going to come in at pennies on the dollar compared to the nuclear option. I'm sure with a little digging I could find the opperational budget of Darlington and a similar sized solar plant in Spain, and normalize for US dollars, but I'stuff came up. If I have time later I'll keep digging.
The project will be a solar generating facility located northwest of Tonopah, Nevada, in Nye County with a nominal net generating capacity of 100 megawatts (MW).
"Nominal net" sure doesn't seem to indicate "peek".
Besides, they tell us the expected annual output of 480,000 MWh. As I pointed out above, $100/MWh would be a bargain. So in the first year alone they are looking at pulling in $48 million if the price of electricity drops. But realisticly, they'll ship the power to Cali, there $150-200/MWh would be more accurate. They should have no problem paying off the loan on a 15 year schedule, and still have plenty of money left over for labor and maintenance.
Our taxes aren't paying for this. It is a group of private investors and private developers working out a loan. The feds have an interest in seeing it go through, so the insure the loan, so that if the private developers bail, the private investors don't get completely hosed. It's quite common and it costs us taxpayers nothing.
$7 per watt of capacity, not per watt-hour. That same $7 watt of capacity is used almost every hour of every day (sunlight+8 it sounds like), the amorted cost of that watt is insignificant.
Assuming an average of 18 hours a day of energy production at $7 construction costs per watt of capacity, after 1 day that's $0.38 per watt-hour. After 1 week that's $0.05 per watt-hour. After 1 year that's.1 cent per watt-hour. Over the life of the facility, which I can't imagine will be less than 15 years, that 1 watt of capacity will have cost about $0.000007 per watt-hour.
First, the $737M loan is not from the government, it's from private investors. The Feds are just insuring the debt. They will only pay out if the project fails.
Second, yes, $737M/75,000 houses is $9826. Assuming the facility lasts for 15 years (which seems exceptionally short), it would take $54 per month per household to pay off the principal. No feedstock to purchase, but the article mentions 60 jobs and likely some materials for maintenance. so if you figure it has a $5M-10M annual opperating budget (assuming staffing costs average 40-80k per head and having money for maintenance) you'd have to add on another $5-11 to the customers' monthly bill.
So yeah, $737M sounds like a lot, but it means the median power bill can be right around $100/month for 75k consumers, and it'll be turning a nice profit.
My local power is primarily coal with a smidge of wind, and I pay roughly $100 per MWh (last bill was ~$65 for ~700KWh). So this really doesn't seem to out of the realm of possible. Especially if they keep opperating costs low.
I also said that bad users will hose ANY PC. Windows, Apple, Linux, etc...
Typically, as soon as you get onto a managed network on a managed PC, the first thing the net admins do is remove your local admin access.You want to install every tool bar ever created? Too bad, put in a help desk ticket and your request will be assessed and dealt with.
I never said the Windows was the most secure option. I said that in the PC (you know Personal Computer) arena, habitual rebuilds are not necesary. Save yourself hours of work every year, create a non-admin user account for your dad. Make sure auto updates, windows firewall, and essentials are all set up, and get over the "Windows Sucks!" bridge. It ain't perfect, but it's really not nearly as bad as you are making it out to be in the PC arena.
Contrast : for OSX, I get a popup every couple of weeks letting me know that updates are ready.
No kidding! If only Windows has some form of Automatic Updates system built in. Where it would you know, like automatically patch Windows, your drivers, and a number of third party tools. It would be great too, if they were to put a button some place so that you could adjust the schedule, or tell it to do an update immediately, or change it from a manual process to a completely silent process. And it would be totally smart to put that button someplace really easy to find. You know, like RIGHT AT THE TOP OF THE START MENU.
I run windows at home. I have auto updates turned on. I have the built in firewall enabled. I have Microsoft Security Essencials (free) installed.
And you know what? I haven't rebuilt my machine since I put it together.
My wife's machine is an older XP box, same deal, I haven't touched it except for when we had a hard drive die.
Media PC? Same deal, anchient XP box, I've not touched a thing on it. Even Flash is auto-updating now.
Here's the deal: Bad users will hose any PC. And sure, web OS's may be right for those individuals. Heck, it may even be right in a corporate environment with an infrastructure as rock solid as Google's. But for the vast majority of PC users, it would just be a gimmick used to seperate them from their money.
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I spent my time under Clinton and Bush Jr as a 4067. That's a Computer Programmer in the Marine Corps. We had pretty solid gear available, decent servers, and a great network. One royal PITA though was the primary personel database was replicated out nightly from Kansas city. So any intra-base changes could take a full 24 hour window to propagate. Additionally, every 6 months we'd get someone new in charge of that database. And by "in charge" I mean a comitee, not a new DBA. And they would be compelled to rename half the tables and columns. Acronyms are good for 6 months, then all field names are typed in full, then we're down to 4 character codes, then into some strange "drop the vowels" campaign. ROYAL PITA.
As if that wasn't bad enough, in 2001 Bush and military leadership privatized the entire 4000 MOS field. 4066 (networkers) and 4067 (programmers) were lat moved to the 0600 MOSs (radio operators and field wiremen, along with some shunting to admin/clerical). So at the point I was heading out, we were going from a situation where Marines could review and make recommendations, to the point where purchasing decisions were almost entirely in the hands of private contractors.
It was removing just another cog in the machine to streamline the federal cash to corporate pockets process as the Foxes are now instructing the farmer on how to build a hen house.
-Rick
"The TSA should be cut immediately by 50%"
The TSA should be cut immediately by 90%. Airport security should be left in the hands of the AIRPORTS, who wouldn't be wasting $370 million on this crap.
The TSA's role should be one of training, testing, and verifying. They should have a limited number of "secret shopper" agents that attempt to sneak weapons/bombs through the security check points to ensure that they are performing adiquetly. If an airport is failing to pass reasonable rates and is failing to improve, remove them from the "inside" network. Sure, you can still fly from there, but where ever you land you'll have to exit the terminal and re-enter through security.
Problem solved. You'll have the airports looking for the most effective and cheapest possible solution, the TSA to measure their performance, and we'll get rid of the back scatters AND fleecing of the US tax payers.
-Rick
I fly for work, often internationally. I decline the backscatter and go for the grope. I figure if I'm going to have my 4th amendment rights violated, I'd rather have it done by a person than by a machine.
But I have had my penis groped. Not in the "back of the hand till it meets resistance" way either. Now, it probably wasn't intentional, either of the times it happened, but twice I have had TSA agents place that open palm on my penis. Twice I had a TSA agent pull my pants away from my body and look down the crack, one of those times the agent pulled both pants and underware to get the full money shot.
I'm sure there is a "right" method, but in my experience, the vast majority of TSA screening agents don't know what that is.
And I'm doubtful as to a "legal" method as current law requires that if you arrive at security, you can not leave with out being inspected, even if you decline the search and skip the flight. The TSA is a branch of the government, not a private company protecting private property. And this all sounds like a whole lot of Search and Seisure with out just cause. This doesn't even meet the requirement's of the "Stop and Frisk" ruling from SCOTUS.
-Rick
If you are a bomber are you going to go to the airport and "hope" you don't get the explosives test?
And how many terrorist attacks has the TSA stopped since they instituted these changes?
Oh that's right: ZERO.
Everyone that has been attempted has made it past the TSA screening and only been stopped by the FBI, the people on the plane, and/or their own incompetence.
The TSA has a 0% success rate, why would a bomber be afraid of being caught? The TSA hasn't caught anyone, ever. I'd say the bomber has pretty good odds of getting through security.
-Rick
The fact that untrained National Guardsmen were put into a prison guard position speaks to the total incompotence of the leadership.
I remember hearing this story break, and my response was "Well duh, what did they think would happen? Did they never hear of the Stanford project?"
These were part timers. They do one weekend a month, and a couple of weeks camping out in the summer. They don't have psych screening or extensive training in prison environments. They aren't professional soldiers. They are college kids, laborers, service industry pros. People who can't afford college or are looking for a little extra on the side. They aren't rich enough to do it on their own, and they aren't driven/desperate enough to go into the professional military. Not to knock on them, but really, the National Guard does NOT belong in foreign warzones or overseeing prisons.
-Rick
old setups. With my archaic Pentium hooked up to a standard def rear projection, I'm capped at a pretty low resolution. The old system was sized such that I had to scroll the browser to see all of the titles on a line, the new system, I can scroll the titles with out having to scroll the browser. Way better experience, although I'd rather have a push button for scrolling than the current mouse hover (that's my big gripe about Boxee as well!)
Really though, if the old version had a 'low-res' version, it would have been just as good. It's pretty silly though, between HTML 5 and Silverlight, there is no reason for them to be using arbitrary screen resolutions for layout.
-Rick
What is the mechanism that will rectify this? Zambian miners forming a union and demanding jobs at the Glory Hole in Alaska?
It's a bit of a wild idea and would have huge ramifications, but applying a COLA pegged labor adjustment tarrif on all imports could. If it take 10 man hours for a pound of sellable material, and the COLA in Zimbabwe was ~$10 US ($0.005/hr) compared to similar labor costs of $60,000 (~$30/hr) in the US, then the tarrif would be just shy of $300 per pound.
It would be a huge equalizing for as it would give international vendors a choice: Sell cheap, but pay a huge tarrif, or pay your employees comprable rates to the US labor force, and get no tarrif. The impact though, is that prices for cheap stuff in the US would skyrocket, and that international vendors would look at automating as much of their labor as possible.
I'm not sure if it would be a good idea, as it would have some huge ramifications, but I think it would be an interesting idea to have some economist debate over.
-Rick
Consider it motivation for you, the tax payer, to pay attention to, or to become part of your local school board. Since most school funding is provided through property taxes, you DO have local control.
-Rick
for multiplayer strategy board games.
Imagine a M:tG game where you have your hand on your controler but you share the table with your opponent. Or a Clue! murder mistery, again with your own set of clues on your controler and the full board on display. Or an RPG with your character info and stats on your controler and the active game on the screen. Or a FF Strategies or Maden footbal style game where each player can control play selection, and possibly even FPS style game play on their control while the screen shows a typical football or kunfu movie interface.
I think there are definately uses for it, especially in multi-player and social atmospheres.
Not that I'm going to buy one, but it looks like there could be some action for it.
-Rick
He warned the Brits in the same way I worn the people I play poker with that I'm about to take all their money... with a bluff. He didn't set out to warn the Brits. He was captured and saw an opportunity to gain freedom and buy time for the militias to assemble.
-Rick
LOL, he didn't "Warn" them. He made up a bogus story to try to scare them. By claiming that there was a 500+ man strong militia defending Lexington, it forced the smaller forward units to double back to the main army and warn them (and slowing them down) and allowed Revere to go free and bought time for the rebels to assemble. The brits were walking a ~700 man army into the region, expecting little resistance. To find out that there was a 500+ strong militia defending their target would be a significant set back.
Paul Revere was playing poker, he bluffed, and his captors bought it. But to call that "warning" is just rediculous.
-Rick
I have a pair just like them! And I think there may even be some scantly clad pictures of me out in the world. If it had shown up on MY twitter feed I would be hard pressed to unilaterally deny being the subject. I don't believe it was me, IIRC I wasn't wearing that pair of underware that night, but it could be a pic of me from years ago with the time stamp altered.
-Rick
That last interview with Wolf Blitzer, it sounded like he was saying that there ARE pics like that of him, but he couldn't say if that was one of them nor how it got onto his twitter feed. There was a fair bit of tap dancing in his answers though, so who knows... more importantly, who cares?
-Rick
pushed by recording industry officials to try to criminalize their customers and increase their profit margin.
-Rick
So what are they going to do, fly into Texas then load the plane up on a flat bed trailer and drive it over the border?
Even the corporate/prift driven schools create a framework for innovation. I went to a tech college for a while. An interesting experience, but the non-teaching faculty was far more concerned with profit margins than education. And there were a lot of kids who skated by doing the bare minimum and they got crap for the money they paid.
But there were quite a few kids who took the opportunities to push themselves. To take the framework of the class and to seek out challenges. The same kids who could excell giving $100,000 to start a business are the same kids who are going to excell given a more free form college experience.
But lets face it, most freshman year colleges (be it voc or uni) are not "free form". They are ridgid, they are sitting in lecture halls, they are doing the rote work that isn't entertaining of challenging. Getting to the upper classes where there is more independence and the students are more mature, you see a whole different college experience. And this guy is recommending kid to bail, after they've completed the worst of it (IMO).
-Rick
I'm still not following your logic.
If they produce 480MWh each year. And 1 MWh sells for up to $200 in southern Cali, they should be able to generate revenues just shy of $100M per year. If they put the entirety of their revenues into loan repayment, that would have the loan paid off in 7 1/2 years.
Comparatively, the Darlington Nuclear Generating Station took 12 years and an inflation adjusted $22.6 billion dollars to build. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that $737M is a lot less than $22.6B.
It puts out roughly 23,000,000 MWh annually. Electric utilities are public in canada, but IF they were charging $200/MWh that's $4.6B/year in revenue. Applying 100% of the revenue to the construction loan, they would have it paid off in 5 years.
So yes, the construction costs can be paid off more quickly with a Nuclear system like Darlington, but the solar option would be about 1.5 times AS expensive than the nuclear option. And that is completely ignoring fuel stock, maintenance, payroll, and security. Of which I'm pretty sure that the solar system is going to come in at pennies on the dollar compared to the nuclear option. I'm sure with a little digging I could find the opperational budget of Darlington and a similar sized solar plant in Spain, and normalize for US dollars, but I'stuff came up. If I have time later I'll keep digging.
-Rick
I would be curious if the threat of withholding health services could be considered duress.
-Rick
From the company building the site:
The project will be a solar generating facility located northwest of Tonopah, Nevada, in Nye County with a nominal net generating capacity of 100 megawatts (MW).
"Nominal net" sure doesn't seem to indicate "peek".
Besides, they tell us the expected annual output of 480,000 MWh. As I pointed out above, $100/MWh would be a bargain. So in the first year alone they are looking at pulling in $48 million if the price of electricity drops. But realisticly, they'll ship the power to Cali, there $150-200/MWh would be more accurate. They should have no problem paying off the loan on a 15 year schedule, and still have plenty of money left over for labor and maintenance.
-Rick
Our taxes aren't paying for this. It is a group of private investors and private developers working out a loan. The feds have an interest in seeing it go through, so the insure the loan, so that if the private developers bail, the private investors don't get completely hosed. It's quite common and it costs us taxpayers nothing.
-Rick
$7 per watt of capacity, not per watt-hour. That same $7 watt of capacity is used almost every hour of every day (sunlight+8 it sounds like), the amorted cost of that watt is insignificant.
Assuming an average of 18 hours a day of energy production at $7 construction costs per watt of capacity, after 1 day that's $0.38 per watt-hour. After 1 week that's $0.05 per watt-hour. After 1 year that's .1 cent per watt-hour. Over the life of the facility, which I can't imagine will be less than 15 years, that 1 watt of capacity will have cost about $0.000007 per watt-hour.
-Rick
First, the $737M loan is not from the government, it's from private investors. The Feds are just insuring the debt. They will only pay out if the project fails.
Second, yes, $737M/75,000 houses is $9826. Assuming the facility lasts for 15 years (which seems exceptionally short), it would take $54 per month per household to pay off the principal. No feedstock to purchase, but the article mentions 60 jobs and likely some materials for maintenance. so if you figure it has a $5M-10M annual opperating budget (assuming staffing costs average 40-80k per head and having money for maintenance) you'd have to add on another $5-11 to the customers' monthly bill.
So yeah, $737M sounds like a lot, but it means the median power bill can be right around $100/month for 75k consumers, and it'll be turning a nice profit.
My local power is primarily coal with a smidge of wind, and I pay roughly $100 per MWh (last bill was ~$65 for ~700KWh). So this really doesn't seem to out of the realm of possible. Especially if they keep opperating costs low.
-Rick
Way to shift the arguement.
I also said that bad users will hose ANY PC. Windows, Apple, Linux, etc...
Typically, as soon as you get onto a managed network on a managed PC, the first thing the net admins do is remove your local admin access.You want to install every tool bar ever created? Too bad, put in a help desk ticket and your request will be assessed and dealt with.
I never said the Windows was the most secure option. I said that in the PC (you know Personal Computer) arena, habitual rebuilds are not necesary. Save yourself hours of work every year, create a non-admin user account for your dad. Make sure auto updates, windows firewall, and essentials are all set up, and get over the "Windows Sucks!" bridge. It ain't perfect, but it's really not nearly as bad as you are making it out to be in the PC arena.
-Rick
Contrast : for OSX, I get a popup every couple of weeks letting me know that updates are ready.
No kidding! If only Windows has some form of Automatic Updates system built in. Where it would you know, like automatically patch Windows, your drivers, and a number of third party tools. It would be great too, if they were to put a button some place so that you could adjust the schedule, or tell it to do an update immediately, or change it from a manual process to a completely silent process. And it would be totally smart to put that button someplace really easy to find. You know, like RIGHT AT THE TOP OF THE START MENU.
I run windows at home. I have auto updates turned on. I have the built in firewall enabled. I have Microsoft Security Essencials (free) installed.
And you know what? I haven't rebuilt my machine since I put it together.
My wife's machine is an older XP box, same deal, I haven't touched it except for when we had a hard drive die.
Media PC? Same deal, anchient XP box, I've not touched a thing on it. Even Flash is auto-updating now.
Here's the deal: Bad users will hose any PC. And sure, web OS's may be right for those individuals. Heck, it may even be right in a corporate environment with an infrastructure as rock solid as Google's. But for the vast majority of PC users, it would just be a gimmick used to seperate them from their money.
-Rick
I'm sure Sergey would love to see Crome laptops take off. That way he can charge $20 a month for anyone who wants to use "their" computer.
-Rick