Is this really how you want your tax dollars spent? I mean seriously. If this was in my town I would rather they refunded us the money they would have spent on the project then going forwarded with it. When will you people get it, capitalism, private industry always trumps government. Look at NASA. Now look at Burt Rutan. Now look at NASA again.
Citywide wireless as a city run service?
I hope you enjoy the crappy service you are gonna get. I hope you like the speed you are gonna get. Cause if the city can realize a profit from this it is a short penstroke away from making there monopoly the law. Once that happens you won't ever see upgrades again.
Don't get me wrong. I don't like how certain companies are approaching governments regarding this stuff. They are trying to get a monopoly written in there favor. That is no better.
I like the idea of competeing companies for my dollars. I just don't see a productive place for government run business in that.
All the old security problems were starting to bore me. Now I can look forward to an entire new set of problems. Just think this time next year we will be griping about things like 'hijacked tabs' and such.
In the sense that if no one comes forward asking for charges to be pressed then it is legal. I mean, think about it, who would be asking for the charges to be pressed? The website owners. The very ones committing fraud. If they want to contact the government and say that some haxors are getting in there way of some harmless fraud then I say, go for it.
Don't worry we will get around to suing you eventually. But in the meantime you have those MP3's lying around.... mind if we use them for something that we can turn a profit on?
My neighbor is an Aspect Oriented Programmer! What about my 3 year old? Is he gonna come down with cancer? Should I move? Is there a list that shows where these people live? Can they be tracked by satelites?
This is smart. I have been contemplating something along these lines for a while. If I am doing a repetative task on my computer what would it take for the OS to see the pattern and take the work out of my hands?
As an example. Lets say I have a folder of MP3 files and I want to rename all of them by putting the artists name in front of the song name. Say the old name is 'Walk the Dog.mp3' so I would change it to 'Aerosmith - Walk the Dog.mp3'. The way I would currently do it would be to do a cut and paste of the characters 'Aerosmith - ' and just insert them in the beginning of all the names manually. What would it take from a technical standpoint for the Operating system to see that I have done this task 5 times and offer to finish off the rest of the files in the folder for me?
Or something similar. I work as a computer operator. More times then not I have jobs crash on me because a programmer has forgotten a semicolon, or has improper spacing. When I think about this it kind of hits me hard. We are talking machines that are far more powerful then desktops. We are talking multiprocessor machines with gigs and gigs of ram that are superior to anything a desktop user would see. But forget a semicolon or use improper spacing and they are brought to there knees! Good Hell! Why is it the OS can't see that this is a stupid mistake by a human and make the change on the fly?
You know there is an easy solution to this. They should stop making the keypads for entering in the pin number in the classic layout of numbers. Instead the pad should be a random jumble of the numbers 0-9. It would be random (well as random as something like this can get anyhow) so you cannot simply memorize the layout anymore. If the user has to look at the pad to be certain he is pressing the correct numbers then it is gonna make it very difficult for the theif looking over the shoulder.
That's just effing incredible. Why have I never read of this on Slashdot before? So what is the deal, is the train powered by Linux? Or maybe just Penguins?
If weather and driving directions are all they have in there bag of goodies then they do NOT have much longer to live.
I point you to Google Maps. http://maps.google.com/
Oh, Oh, Oh Oh My! I dig this idea!
on
Apple to Buy TiVo?
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· Score: 1, Redundant
I have been reading all this negative stuff about the state of Tivo lately. It is scary and depressing stuff. I Love my Tivo. I say this so strongly and frequently that my girlfriend is starting to become jeleous/disturbed/worried. You know, I think this may be a BETTER idea then them hiring on a new CEO. Apple would be a fabulous match. Go Steve Jobs Go!
You got it backwards. You DISABLE the evil bit. Enableing the evil bit allows people acess to things like child porn and naked pictures of Oprah Winfrey and the like.
1. It really isn't fair to issue a review of a product in its beta form. Yes it can be argued that Microsoft throwing out this software in the public domain pretty much gives people the write to issue opinions on it, but it seems to me that in a respected news source like the WSJ should take there ability to influence people to heart and wait for a final version before issuing reviews.
2. The reviewer faulted this tool for not finding cookies. Big whoop. Seriously, cookies are highly overrated. Ad-Aware is a pretty good tool, but its insistance in clearing out all my cookies causes me to have to redo passwords and such for websites that I would have rather left alone. This utility ignoring the cookies is a good thing.
3. Resets hijacked home pages to MSN. Buyer beware? Oh thats right this software is free. The problem with hijacked home pages is that there is a script that keeps resetting them to the hijacked page, you can't get rid of it. I haven't tested this, but I imagine that the Microsoft tool simply resets your home page to MSN. You are free to change it back to whatever you want. I imagine it would be a simple enough thing for Microsoft to reset it back to what it was originally, but that requires that your home page wasn't hijacked when the tool was installed. All in all if Microsoft want's to make MSN the default home page with this tool, and the tool is free, I say we got what we paid for. Let them have it.
4. Doesn't support Firefox. Let me get this straight. Microsoft offers a product for free that a good many of us would be willing to pay for and they don't offer support for there competing web browser? Say it aint so! Let me be the first to say that if you wan't Firefox support then maybe you should look at an open source solution or possibly a pay client that supports Firefox. As long as Microsoft is giving this thing away faulting them for this is bias pure and simple.
You are probably correct in that assesment. Rule #1 has more to do with getting a grip about what it is you are participating in then an actual exchange in value. Don't allow yourself to get too caught up in the.org of the web address or the idea that it is being promoted as some sort of charitable thing. I mean, if it was truly charitable I would be able to take some sort of tax deduction, correct? How would you go about making a deduction for my Grid.Org time or my Seti@home time? These things have more akin to a 'hobby' or a shared interest then they do a charity.
For me I like Easynews. I enjoy it. As such that extra gig of bandwith that they give me is something that I put percieved value on. I am not asking to be paid for the electricity or the maintenence, I want to be compensated because they are not a charity, they are not a non-profit.
I see Rule #1 as being both the most important, but also the most flexible.
1. Project is either a true non-profit project or I get a piece of the action. Example of non-profit, Seti@home. I am willing to consider a university project like that non-profit. You may dismiss Seti@home because of the abusrbly low chances it has of finding something, but I choose to see it has having a tremendous value to computer science. Example of getting a piece of the action, Easynews will give me 1 gig of transfers for every 15 days I run the Grid.Org client. Thing about Grid.Org is that it doesn't meet my personal definition of non-profit. The smallpox study they are so famous for, think about it. A drug company is going to use that information. That is information that would have previously costed the drug companies 10's of millions of dollars is now being used for something close to free. You are spending money running your PC 24/7 and the drug company is going to make a profit. Hardly non-profit. I don't want much, that offer from Easynews is perfect for me.
2. The client must be well written and secure. I run a windows box, I spend too much time thinking about security as it is. There are a ton of competing DC clients out there. If yours doesn't pass the security test or (God forbid) it crashes my machine then it is bye-bye to you.
3. The client must be unobtrusive. Period. In a way this is more like a 2.5, but 3 is a popular number for lists like this, so 3 it is. I shouldn't have to worry about the client. It should come up when the PC is turned on, it should come down when it is turned off. There should be no prompting for network connections (unless I tell it I want prompting) and I should never wonder why framerates have gone bad and then realize the DC client is running.
Part of me is fascinated by the idea of an 'Open Grid'. What an interesting concept. Part of me is scared to death. You can call me niave if you want. But aren't the security concerns of something like this kind of nightmarish?
I like my toys as much, no possibly MORE then the next guy. And God knows aviation is my thing. The Space Station should be a no brainer.
But there comes a time where you have to say, 'Look we gave it the good old college try. If it was meant to be it would be a success already, but alas it isn't working out.'.
For Gods sake deorbit it already.
Could there possibly be a more humiliating end to the space station then being abondend for lack of food?
I am sure you are right about 3DFX. Pity. If nVidia really assimalated the 3dFX code into there own then I suppose there is nothing to talk about. But if nVida just simply bought the company to get rid of a competitor and allowed the intellectual property to rot, damn what a waste. Seems like the work would be half done. Imagine nVida selling the property to this group but insisting on retaining some rights so the group cannot turn into some sort of competitor. Would be a good deal for both parties.
What about OPenGL? Please excuse my obvious ignorance, but isn't OpenGL supposed to be an open sourced set of graphic drivers? Couldn't OpenGL be implemented in some way to be of service?
I am glancing at the specs and I have a couple thoughts. The first is that these are respectable specs - providing you don't want to to any gaming. I think that is a really important caveat. I know that every once in a while people get all excited because the usual suspects port there games to Linux - you know ID and Blizzard come to mind. It is a good thing that these two companies do this, but it is a bad thing that there are really only two companies that do this with anything approaching reliability. Thing is... a card with these specs, especially considering that it is a year if not more away from reality will never cut it for any sort of gaming. You are going to produce a card with 3D support that doesn't have the muscle to handle any 3d games that are produced. If you are fine with that then there is nothing wrong with those specs. This card will be able to handle email, porn and movies as well as anything ATI produces.
My 2nd thought is a bit more practicle. Actually there may not be anything practicle about it. Might just be wishful thinking really. What about 3DFX? What about OPENGL? Between the two things isn't half the work already done? I know it might seem insane - nuts even, but back in the day 3dFX had some very respectible hardware. They didn't fail cause there stuff was poop, they failed cause they underestimated nVidia (which in turn underestimated ATI). The hardware is still out there, the code is still out there. It just isn't being utilized. Would there be anything wrong with utilizing these old resources to achieve this goal?
Another road block to going to Mars. As if it wasn't hard enough... and improbable enough already. I don't doubt Bush's good intentions on the Mars initiative, but I find it very hard to believe that the next administration won't kill it dead.
This dude is all like, 'everywhere you look there is a crashed spaceship...'. When the first part of that statement is a problem then I say we worry about it.
Someone else already said this and got modded funny. He said that the spaceships should be the natural parks. He is right. Viking 1 and 2 would be national parks if we colonized Mars.
I feel very strongly that we are coming up against a graphics ceiling. A place where more powerful video cards or new consoles fail to yeild results that make it worth the effort to produce the superior eye candy.
When (if) this happens I see three possible results: 1) Crash to make the original video game crash of the 80's look tame. 2) The spare CPU power that we have to play with, the CPU power that used to get shuffled into graphics gets shuffled into some sort of OS. Imagine if someone could create an OS (maybe even only on devolopers end) that had an AI component that was self optimizing or maybe even if it could optimize on the fly. Where you could get away with writing crappy code but would still get killer results. This would shake the game publishing world to its very roots. 3) Same as 2 except the extra CPU cycles go to a physics processor instead of the OS. What if we had a sound chip, a graphics chip, a physics chip and a general CPU?
The people that say that this smacks of conversion and fanaticalism are correct. I mean, put it in the xmas cards if you want, but don't get all upset if no one installs it. I mean seriously, how many people really want to think about OS's during Christmas? This is a better Halloween gift then anything. You can be that crazy old man that gives out Linux Distros instead of candy bars.
On a serious note. This puts a thought in my head.
I have pretty much 'zero' interest in running Linux thankyouverymuch. One of the reasons I don't desire to attempt it is because of the headache factor. Command line commands I don't know, drivers I don't know where to find, sound card that won't work.... blah, blah blah.
All I know is that when I install windows it comes up as advertised.
See, I think this guy is onto something. I just don't think he is thinking of the correct use for it. What about a seriously generic Linux distro where a newbie like myself could put it in his CD drive, it would boot into some sort of DOS like equivelant where it would ask some simple questions about partioning and formatting the drive, then 20 minutes later it would finish the install and boot me up to a GUI desktop with video drivers installed (well generic ones at least), sound drivers installed and firefox installed.
I am not aware that such a creature exists. It probably does though. But that is one reason I haven't attempted it. I don't feel like taking on a learning curve that for me would start on the install. I can learn about dealing with drivers and command lines and such later. Just get me to a GUI desktop so I have some sort of baseline to work from.
I use GoToMyPC. If I am at my parents house on Thanksgiving and they start griping and asking me to fix it I will go to there machine, log onto www.gotomypc.com , log into my account, download the java app that it runs on (I forget the size but it is small, 15 minutes on a 56k connection), install it and turn it on.
I will then go back to them and tell them to call me some evening next week and I will log on and fix it. This is Thanksgiving and I am not interested.
Ditto for the rest of the family. I have talked numerous people through the installing the app phase over the phone.
Of course if you have a family that fights (I am blessed that my family gets along) then maybe fixing the PC is a good thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Is this really how you want your tax dollars spent? I mean seriously. If this was in my town I would rather they refunded us the money they would have spent on the project then going forwarded with it.
When will you people get it, capitalism, private industry always trumps government.
Look at NASA. Now look at Burt Rutan. Now look at NASA again.
Citywide wireless as a city run service?
I hope you enjoy the crappy service you are gonna get. I hope you like the speed you are gonna get. Cause if the city can realize a profit from this it is a short penstroke away from making there monopoly the law. Once that happens you won't ever see upgrades again.
Don't get me wrong. I don't like how certain companies are approaching governments regarding this stuff. They are trying to get a monopoly written in there favor. That is no better.
I like the idea of competeing companies for my dollars. I just don't see a productive place for government run business in that.
All the old security problems were starting to bore me. Now I can look forward to an entire new set of problems.
Just think this time next year we will be griping about things like 'hijacked tabs' and such.
In the sense that if no one comes forward asking for charges to be pressed then it is legal.
I mean, think about it, who would be asking for the charges to be pressed?
The website owners. The very ones committing fraud. If they want to contact the government and say that some haxors are getting in there way of some harmless fraud then I say, go for it.
Don't worry we will get around to suing you eventually. But in the meantime you have those MP3's lying around....
mind if we use them for something that we can turn a profit on?
I certainly don't. How can a spreadsheet cost money?
What are businesses overpaying bills? Or keeping projects up that are not needed cause of this?
My neighbor is an Aspect Oriented Programmer!
What about my 3 year old?
Is he gonna come down with cancer?
Should I move?
Is there a list that shows where these people live?
Can they be tracked by satelites?
At least Americans have a basic grasp of the english language and the basic rules of grammer.
All you had to do was write one sentence. You can't even do that correctly. So tell me Illserve, what country holds the keys to your cage?
This is smart.
I have been contemplating something along these lines for a while.
If I am doing a repetative task on my computer what would it take for the OS to see the pattern and take the work out of my hands?
As an example. Lets say I have a folder of MP3 files and I want to rename all of them by putting the artists name in front of the song name. Say the old name is 'Walk the Dog.mp3' so I would change it to 'Aerosmith - Walk the Dog.mp3'.
The way I would currently do it would be to do a cut and paste of the characters 'Aerosmith - ' and just insert them in the beginning of all the names manually.
What would it take from a technical standpoint for the Operating system to see that I have done this task 5 times and offer to finish off the rest of the files in the folder for me?
Or something similar. I work as a computer operator. More times then not I have jobs crash on me because a programmer has forgotten a semicolon, or has improper spacing. When I think about this it kind of hits me hard. We are talking machines that are far more powerful then desktops. We are talking multiprocessor machines with gigs and gigs of ram that are superior to anything a desktop user would see.
But forget a semicolon or use improper spacing and they are brought to there knees!
Good Hell!
Why is it the OS can't see that this is a stupid mistake by a human and make the change on the fly?
You know there is an easy solution to this.
They should stop making the keypads for entering in the pin number in the classic layout of numbers. Instead the pad should be a random jumble of the numbers 0-9. It would be random (well as random as something like this can get anyhow) so you cannot simply memorize the layout anymore. If the user has to look at the pad to be certain he is pressing the correct numbers then it is gonna make it very difficult for the theif looking over the shoulder.
Wait a minute....
A Linux TRAIN?!?!?
That's just effing incredible. Why have I never read of this on Slashdot before?
So what is the deal, is the train powered by Linux? Or maybe just Penguins?
If weather and driving directions are all they have in there bag of goodies then they do NOT have much longer to live.
I point you to Google Maps. http://maps.google.com/
I have been reading all this negative stuff about the state of Tivo lately. It is scary and depressing stuff.
I Love my Tivo. I say this so strongly and frequently that my girlfriend is starting to become jeleous/disturbed/worried.
You know, I think this may be a BETTER idea then them hiring on a new CEO. Apple would be a fabulous match.
Go Steve Jobs Go!
You got it backwards.
You DISABLE the evil bit. Enableing the evil bit allows people acess to things like child porn and naked pictures of Oprah Winfrey and the like.
'Of course, maybe they just changed this recently due to feedback.'
Hence it is beta.
Problems with these reviews:
1. It really isn't fair to issue a review of a product in its beta form. Yes it can be argued that Microsoft throwing out this software in the public domain pretty much gives people the write to issue opinions on it, but it seems to me that in a respected news source like the WSJ should take there ability to influence people to heart and wait for a final version before issuing reviews.
2. The reviewer faulted this tool for not finding cookies. Big whoop. Seriously, cookies are highly overrated. Ad-Aware is a pretty good tool, but its insistance in clearing out all my cookies causes me to have to redo passwords and such for websites that I would have rather left alone. This utility ignoring the cookies is a good thing.
3. Resets hijacked home pages to MSN. Buyer beware? Oh thats right this software is free. The problem with hijacked home pages is that there is a script that keeps resetting them to the hijacked page, you can't get rid of it. I haven't tested this, but I imagine that the Microsoft tool simply resets your home page to MSN. You are free to change it back to whatever you want. I imagine it would be a simple enough thing for Microsoft to reset it back to what it was originally, but that requires that your home page wasn't hijacked when the tool was installed. All in all if Microsoft want's to make MSN the default home page with this tool, and the tool is free, I say we got what we paid for. Let them have it.
4. Doesn't support Firefox. Let me get this straight. Microsoft offers a product for free that a good many of us would be willing to pay for and they don't offer support for there competing web browser? Say it aint so!
Let me be the first to say that if you wan't Firefox support then maybe you should look at an open source solution or possibly a pay client that supports Firefox. As long as Microsoft is giving this thing away faulting them for this is bias pure and simple.
You are probably correct in that assesment. .org of the web address or the idea that it is being promoted as some sort of charitable thing.
Rule #1 has more to do with getting a grip about what it is you are participating in then an actual exchange in value.
Don't allow yourself to get too caught up in the
I mean, if it was truly charitable I would be able to take some sort of tax deduction, correct? How would you go about making a deduction for my Grid.Org time or my Seti@home time?
These things have more akin to a 'hobby' or a shared interest then they do a charity.
For me I like Easynews. I enjoy it. As such that extra gig of bandwith that they give me is something that I put percieved value on. I am not asking to be paid for the electricity or the maintenence, I want to be compensated because they are not a charity, they are not a non-profit.
I see Rule #1 as being both the most important, but also the most flexible.
(order of importance)
1. Project is either a true non-profit project or I get a piece of the action. Example of non-profit, Seti@home. I am willing to consider a university project like that non-profit. You may dismiss Seti@home because of the abusrbly low chances it has of finding something, but I choose to see it has having a tremendous value to computer science. Example of getting a piece of the action, Easynews will give me 1 gig of transfers for every 15 days I run the Grid.Org client. Thing about Grid.Org is that it doesn't meet my personal definition of non-profit. The smallpox study they are so famous for, think about it. A drug company is going to use that information. That is information that would have previously costed the drug companies 10's of millions of dollars is now being used for something close to free. You are spending money running your PC 24/7 and the drug company is going to make a profit. Hardly non-profit. I don't want much, that offer from Easynews is perfect for me.
2. The client must be well written and secure. I run a windows box, I spend too much time thinking about security as it is. There are a ton of competing DC clients out there. If yours doesn't pass the security test or (God forbid) it crashes my machine then it is bye-bye to you.
3. The client must be unobtrusive. Period. In a way this is more like a 2.5, but 3 is a popular number for lists like this, so 3 it is. I shouldn't have to worry about the client. It should come up when the PC is turned on, it should come down when it is turned off. There should be no prompting for network connections (unless I tell it I want prompting) and I should never wonder why framerates have gone bad and then realize the DC client is running.
Part of me is fascinated by the idea of an 'Open Grid'.
What an interesting concept.
Part of me is scared to death.
You can call me niave if you want. But aren't the security concerns of something like this kind of nightmarish?
I like my toys as much, no possibly MORE then the next guy. And God knows aviation is my thing.
The Space Station should be a no brainer.
But there comes a time where you have to say, 'Look we gave it the good old college try. If it was meant to be it would be a success already, but alas it isn't working out.'.
For Gods sake deorbit it already.
Could there possibly be a more humiliating end to the space station then being abondend for lack of food?
I am sure you are right about 3DFX.
Pity. If nVidia really assimalated the 3dFX code into there own then I suppose there is nothing to talk about.
But if nVida just simply bought the company to get rid of a competitor and allowed the intellectual property to rot, damn what a waste. Seems like the work would be half done.
Imagine nVida selling the property to this group but insisting on retaining some rights so the group cannot turn into some sort of competitor. Would be a good deal for both parties.
What about OPenGL?
Please excuse my obvious ignorance, but isn't OpenGL supposed to be an open sourced set of graphic drivers? Couldn't OpenGL be implemented in some way to be of service?
I am glancing at the specs and I have a couple thoughts.
The first is that these are respectable specs - providing you don't want to to any gaming.
I think that is a really important caveat. I know that every once in a while people get all excited because the usual suspects port there games to Linux - you know ID and Blizzard come to mind.
It is a good thing that these two companies do this, but it is a bad thing that there are really only two companies that do this with anything approaching reliability.
Thing is... a card with these specs, especially considering that it is a year if not more away from reality will never cut it for any sort of gaming. You are going to produce a card with 3D support that doesn't have the muscle to handle any 3d games that are produced.
If you are fine with that then there is nothing wrong with those specs. This card will be able to handle email, porn and movies as well as anything ATI produces.
My 2nd thought is a bit more practicle.
Actually there may not be anything practicle about it. Might just be wishful thinking really.
What about 3DFX? What about OPENGL?
Between the two things isn't half the work already done?
I know it might seem insane - nuts even, but back in the day 3dFX had some very respectible hardware. They didn't fail cause there stuff was poop, they failed cause they underestimated nVidia (which in turn underestimated ATI). The hardware is still out there, the code is still out there. It just isn't being utilized.
Would there be anything wrong with utilizing these old resources to achieve this goal?
Another road block to going to Mars.
As if it wasn't hard enough... and improbable enough already.
I don't doubt Bush's good intentions on the Mars initiative, but I find it very hard to believe that the next administration won't kill it dead.
This dude is all like, 'everywhere you look there is a crashed spaceship...'.
When the first part of that statement is a problem then I say we worry about it.
Someone else already said this and got modded funny.
He said that the spaceships should be the natural parks. He is right. Viking 1 and 2 would be national parks if we colonized Mars.
I feel very strongly that we are coming up against a graphics ceiling. A place where more powerful video cards or new consoles fail to yeild results that make it worth the effort to produce the superior eye candy.
When (if) this happens I see three possible results:
1) Crash to make the original video game crash of the 80's look tame.
2) The spare CPU power that we have to play with, the CPU power that used to get shuffled into graphics gets shuffled into some sort of OS. Imagine if someone could create an OS (maybe even only on devolopers end) that had an AI component that was self optimizing or maybe even if it could optimize on the fly. Where you could get away with writing crappy code but would still get killer results. This would shake the game publishing world to its very roots.
3) Same as 2 except the extra CPU cycles go to a physics processor instead of the OS. What if we had a sound chip, a graphics chip, a physics chip and a general CPU?
The people that say that this smacks of conversion and fanaticalism are correct. I mean, put it in the xmas cards if you want, but don't get all upset if no one installs it.
I mean seriously, how many people really want to think about OS's during Christmas?
This is a better Halloween gift then anything. You can be that crazy old man that gives out Linux Distros instead of candy bars.
On a serious note.
This puts a thought in my head.
I have pretty much 'zero' interest in running Linux thankyouverymuch.
One of the reasons I don't desire to attempt it is because of the headache factor. Command line commands I don't know, drivers I don't know where to find, sound card that won't work.... blah, blah blah.
All I know is that when I install windows it comes up as advertised.
See, I think this guy is onto something. I just don't think he is thinking of the correct use for it.
What about a seriously generic Linux distro where a newbie like myself could put it in his CD drive, it would boot into some sort of DOS like equivelant where it would ask some simple questions about partioning and formatting the drive, then 20 minutes later it would finish the install and boot me up to a GUI desktop with video drivers installed (well generic ones at least), sound drivers installed and firefox installed.
I am not aware that such a creature exists. It probably does though. But that is one reason I haven't attempted it. I don't feel like taking on a learning curve that for me would start on the install. I can learn about dealing with drivers and command lines and such later. Just get me to a GUI desktop so I have some sort of baseline to work from.
Seriously. This isn't that hard people.
I use GoToMyPC. If I am at my parents house on Thanksgiving and they start griping and asking me to fix it I will go to there machine, log onto www.gotomypc.com , log into my account, download the java app that it runs on (I forget the size but it is small, 15 minutes on a 56k connection), install it and turn it on.
I will then go back to them and tell them to call me some evening next week and I will log on and fix it. This is Thanksgiving and I am not interested.
Ditto for the rest of the family. I have talked numerous people through the installing the app phase over the phone.
Of course if you have a family that fights (I am blessed that my family gets along) then maybe fixing the PC is a good thing.