I'd grab one to stick on the home network. All it would do is cache local copies of a couple of files - like my to-do list - that I like to be able to glance at in the morning without waiting to fire up all the components of the main rig.
Heck, it could be a control panel for any home automation stuff. Or display a video feed from security cameras. Or hell, be a friggin' _clock_.
Usually unions which signed up nearly everyone working for an employer, IT or not.
To be honest, I think that the union in most of those shops was a good idea for the majority of the workers. Management was continually trying one screwage tactic after another. However, the worst thing that happened in my longest-term workplace was when a particular manager (who also managed hiring) quit and was replaced by a series of executive glove puppets. New hires were idiots, the jobs themselves were downgraded multiple pay levels, and the entire place went completely to hell.
Being in a union then actually hindered the manager who came along next, as he couldn't simply fire the worst of the idiots and get the place back on track. There were people there pulling down higher salaries than he was, and actually contributing negative work because someone else had to be assigned to follow them around fixing their constant screwups.
If I hadn't quit soon after, I would have gone to the CEO and spun a project request involving transferring the few remaining useful people to a new group, bulking that up with new hires who knew what they were doing, and have them gradually take over the role of the original team. They could even have used the opportunity to move the team out of the "temporary" premises they'd occupied for eight years.
Point. It'd be better to distribute a means of communication which didn't rely on easily-disabled infrastructure. Even making every cellphone a satellite uplink just means that the ability to disable/filter/edit calls has been handed to whoever owns the satellites.
Now if they used some kind of long-distance point-to-point grid networking...
I wonder what the effect of rich areas of the country "buying" the votes of multiple poorer areas might be? Increased liberalism until the conservatives caught up to the technology, at which point there could be a financial battle royale?
Still, it would be kind of cool to see Silicon Valley buy out just enough elections here and there to turn parts of the the country into liberal strongholds for a couple of years.
Linear media of any kind cannot be successfully encrypted because of the analog hole. Widespread digital decryption and distribution can be momentarily delayed, but for a day or two at best.
Nonlinear media is much harder to extract through those means, but even so, a digital file is a digital file - you're only going to be able to slow down complete replication if much of the data is served from a remote location in response to active user choices. And depending on how many people are finding and grinding the decision tree, it'll all get extracted eventually anyway.
Content which is generated in real-time by server-side software is much more difficult to copy, especially if it's being modified by humans in strange-attractor loops. Blizzard probably doesn't give a huge flying damn if WoW gets ripped and copied, because each account still needs to pay per month to get access to not only the constantly-updated content on the Blizzard servers, but also the interactions with the other players. The initial upfront cost is just gravy and covers the admin load from n00bs.
The problem the linear media industry has is twofold. First, they don't have experience with making nonlinear media. No-one has put together some brilliant work which clearly shows the way forward. On the other hand, they're being held back by their current audience, which has a HUGE cultural, psychological and technical investment in exactly that - linear media. If all music/film/tv producers found the holy grail of a new format and moved all production to nonlinear versions overnight, it would mean abandoning every customer who buys CDs, DVDs, tapes, vinyl, iTunes, listens to the radio/podcasts/streams, or watches TV, and trying to get ALL of them to buy brand new expensive non-simple technology.
It's cheaper to simply thrash around trying to find a nonexistent cork for the leaks in their submarine, when the problem is that the sea has changed and their hull is now made out of chicken wire.
I still don't think we're going to see the death of linear media. It's too ingrained in pretty much every human culture. What we will see is new ways of getting the performance from the performer to their audience. I'd note, however, that in a world where everyone and their dog has a YouTube video, there will still be a demand for marketing. It's just that now, the marketing will be through SEO, online radio stations and the playlists of web-celeb DJs.
The question is - how long until the *AA or their descendants have 'arrangements' with web sites or podcasts known to attract a lot of viewers/listeners?
Second law of outsourcing: you're tacitly admitting that someone else can run your operation better/cheaper than you can.
Well, parts of it, anyway. Or at least to the point where there's a better performance/price payoff giving money to someone else rather than doing it personally or having a direct employee do it. And that may depend on how large the company is, how often the task needs doing, etc. Effectively, outsourcers are just long-term specialist contractors.
One place I worked, I got promoted as a junior to the Unix area which adminned the infrastructure for a major national government department - a couple hundred servers, twenty-five thousand users, over a million clients.
The first thing I said the day I walked in there was "Could I see a list of the servers we're responsible for?"
"Oh, we don't know what's out there. If something breaks, someone will eventually yell in our direction if they ever work out what's causing their problem."
Needless to say, I butted heads with the (lack of) management there for over a year, until the entire group was shitcanned and control transferred to a team actually able to find its own arse without assistance.
Not to mention that if you can drop $100K on a sportscar, you can drop $5K on a garagetop solar grid to provide 90% of its fuel needs for the rest of its existence.
In fact, if you only use the car for running around town within its range limit, those solar cells will mean you never have to pull into a gas station ever again.
Which is maybe one of the reasons the oil companies are leery of the new tech. It's not just a new fuel, it's the fact that electricity is a fuel source available at every house and every business. Fuel money will start moving from the oil companies to the electricity companies. Unless both industries are owned by the same people, a lot of money is going to be diverted.
Personally, I like the notion of cars where the majority of body panels and glass are unobtrusive solar collectors. If you run out of zap by the side of the road, let the car sit for a couple of hours and you might be able to limp to the nearest electric outlet, or at least be able to charge your phone battery enough to call for assistance. I can see sunlit parking spaces becoming more popular than shaded ones, and people without garagetop chargers parking outside more often.
I can see this being a problem. Personally, I wouldn't want any systems under my watch blocking off internet connectivity until it'd phoned Microsoft and downloaded whatever crapware Microsoft thought I 'needed' to have before it would allow me onto the net proper.
A correct version would be to ask the startup questions "Do you want Windows to upgrade itself to the latest version during installation (Y/n)" and, on a Yes, ask "Where do you want to get the upgrades from? (Microsoft.com/other)". The defaults would behave like you asked, while still allowing people to patch from a local server or disk instead, or skip the updates entirely.
I do wonder why the activation of any network connection _during install only_ isn't delayed until appropriate basic firewall software is running and ready to monitor said connections. Once the install is completed, however, I don't want the boot process automatically killing all network connectivity if it gets its panties in a twist about version numbers or what software it thinks should be installed. That's my call to make, not Microsoft's.
This would be a killer app if it used Google Earth as a base environment. Allow anything from Sketchup to be imported, and your avatar can fly around the planet interacting with 3D objects and other avatars, as well as being able to zoom in to locations and see not only representations of buildings, but clickable parts of those buildings representing links to 3D business interfaces (or organisational websites if they're not running a Lively service themselves). Lively/GE links could even fling your avatar to other in-world locations when selected.
Not to mention that even though CLI commands are easier to use to implement changes and pull data into scripts, 3D models can often present more data in an easier-to-grok visual format.
Why would you want to pay for a warranty on a product which is free? If it breaks, you just get another one. In fact, why not go get twenty of these things at the outset Just In Case?
Slashdot Mirror
There's a joke in here somewhere about the analog hole...
Can they remember it for us wholesale?
Heck, it could be a control panel for any home automation stuff. Or display a video feed from security cameras. Or hell, be a friggin' _clock_.
To be honest, I think that the union in most of those shops was a good idea for the majority of the workers. Management was continually trying one screwage tactic after another. However, the worst thing that happened in my longest-term workplace was when a particular manager (who also managed hiring) quit and was replaced by a series of executive glove puppets. New hires were idiots, the jobs themselves were downgraded multiple pay levels, and the entire place went completely to hell.
Being in a union then actually hindered the manager who came along next, as he couldn't simply fire the worst of the idiots and get the place back on track. There were people there pulling down higher salaries than he was, and actually contributing negative work because someone else had to be assigned to follow them around fixing their constant screwups.
If I hadn't quit soon after, I would have gone to the CEO and spun a project request involving transferring the few remaining useful people to a new group, bulking that up with new hires who knew what they were doing, and have them gradually take over the role of the original team. They could even have used the opportunity to move the team out of the "temporary" premises they'd occupied for eight years.
Point. It'd be better to distribute a means of communication which didn't rely on easily-disabled infrastructure. Even making every cellphone a satellite uplink just means that the ability to disable/filter/edit calls has been handed to whoever owns the satellites. Now if they used some kind of long-distance point-to-point grid networking...
Still, it would be kind of cool to see Silicon Valley buy out just enough elections here and there to turn parts of the the country into liberal strongholds for a couple of years.
I love it - I'm having spam spam spam spam spam spam spam false positive spam spam spam and spam!
Nonlinear media is much harder to extract through those means, but even so, a digital file is a digital file - you're only going to be able to slow down complete replication if much of the data is served from a remote location in response to active user choices. And depending on how many people are finding and grinding the decision tree, it'll all get extracted eventually anyway.
Content which is generated in real-time by server-side software is much more difficult to copy, especially if it's being modified by humans in strange-attractor loops. Blizzard probably doesn't give a huge flying damn if WoW gets ripped and copied, because each account still needs to pay per month to get access to not only the constantly-updated content on the Blizzard servers, but also the interactions with the other players. The initial upfront cost is just gravy and covers the admin load from n00bs.
The problem the linear media industry has is twofold. First, they don't have experience with making nonlinear media. No-one has put together some brilliant work which clearly shows the way forward. On the other hand, they're being held back by their current audience, which has a HUGE cultural, psychological and technical investment in exactly that - linear media. If all music/film/tv producers found the holy grail of a new format and moved all production to nonlinear versions overnight, it would mean abandoning every customer who buys CDs, DVDs, tapes, vinyl, iTunes, listens to the radio/podcasts/streams, or watches TV, and trying to get ALL of them to buy brand new expensive non-simple technology.
It's cheaper to simply thrash around trying to find a nonexistent cork for the leaks in their submarine, when the problem is that the sea has changed and their hull is now made out of chicken wire.
I still don't think we're going to see the death of linear media. It's too ingrained in pretty much every human culture. What we will see is new ways of getting the performance from the performer to their audience. I'd note, however, that in a world where everyone and their dog has a YouTube video, there will still be a demand for marketing. It's just that now, the marketing will be through SEO, online radio stations and the playlists of web-celeb DJs.
The question is - how long until the *AA or their descendants have 'arrangements' with web sites or podcasts known to attract a lot of viewers/listeners?
I'd vote for Porky Pig before I voted for Bush.
Well, parts of it, anyway. Or at least to the point where there's a better performance/price payoff giving money to someone else rather than doing it personally or having a direct employee do it. And that may depend on how large the company is, how often the task needs doing, etc. Effectively, outsourcers are just long-term specialist contractors.
So the next Apple figurehead is going to be a Macbook Air?
They might dress tastefully, thus scarring any number of celebrities for life!
The first thing I said the day I walked in there was "Could I see a list of the servers we're responsible for?"
"Oh, we don't know what's out there. If something breaks, someone will eventually yell in our direction if they ever work out what's causing their problem."
Needless to say, I butted heads with the (lack of) management there for over a year, until the entire group was shitcanned and control transferred to a team actually able to find its own arse without assistance.
Of course, back then it wasn't all faded like it is now.
Federal law in how many countries, exactly?
DEATH BY SNU-SNU!
In fact, if you only use the car for running around town within its range limit, those solar cells will mean you never have to pull into a gas station ever again.
Which is maybe one of the reasons the oil companies are leery of the new tech. It's not just a new fuel, it's the fact that electricity is a fuel source available at every house and every business. Fuel money will start moving from the oil companies to the electricity companies. Unless both industries are owned by the same people, a lot of money is going to be diverted.
Personally, I like the notion of cars where the majority of body panels and glass are unobtrusive solar collectors. If you run out of zap by the side of the road, let the car sit for a couple of hours and you might be able to limp to the nearest electric outlet, or at least be able to charge your phone battery enough to call for assistance. I can see sunlit parking spaces becoming more popular than shaded ones, and people without garagetop chargers parking outside more often.
A correct version would be to ask the startup questions "Do you want Windows to upgrade itself to the latest version during installation (Y/n)" and, on a Yes, ask "Where do you want to get the upgrades from? (Microsoft.com/other)". The defaults would behave like you asked, while still allowing people to patch from a local server or disk instead, or skip the updates entirely.
I do wonder why the activation of any network connection _during install only_ isn't delayed until appropriate basic firewall software is running and ready to monitor said connections. Once the install is completed, however, I don't want the boot process automatically killing all network connectivity if it gets its panties in a twist about version numbers or what software it thinks should be installed. That's my call to make, not Microsoft's.
Not to mention that even though CLI commands are easier to use to implement changes and pull data into scripts, 3D models can often present more data in an easier-to-grok visual format.
Better than having 18" ears and a, uh...
Give the military's budget to NASA. We'll have lunar bases full of space babes before you can say "Set phasers to AWESOME!"
"Because they want to KEEP them."
Why would you want to pay for a warranty on a product which is free? If it breaks, you just get another one. In fact, why not go get twenty of these things at the outset Just In Case?
It's a Joe-job :)
There's a couple of political and religious rallies that need attendin'.