The RIAA and MPAA message to children:

"To care is not to share"

The message I hope this sends to children is that possessing music or movies, even if legally bought, is potentially dangerous and to be avoided.

Lets move towards a world that is devoid of song and stories, and forget the fact these were a part of the fabric of humanity for thousands of years.

Better yet, imagine where the "PC" would be today if IBM had tried something like this.

Imagine if you you were in the early 80s, bought an IBM PC, and the only devices you could add were from IBM?

People bought IBM PCs and clones because there was so much choice and competition. Instead of having separate serial/fdd/parallel/whatever cards from IBM you could throw in some cheap Tiwanese card that did all of that in one. IBM wouldn't support it, and you might wind up blowing up your motherboard and printer, but that is a risk you could CHOOSE to take.

The fact was, a lot of other vendors back then tried to create lock-in like that - upgrades only available from said vendor. And with really only one exception (Apple), where are they now? Long gone and forgotten to history, that is where!

It is because back in the 1990s Microsoft intermingled parts of their OS and browser and insisted their browser was "integrated" in such a way that it could not be removed.

As everyone can clearly see now, this was a dumb thing to do. They did it purely to dissuade vendors from bundling other competing browsers. But now they are committed to supporting the OS and browser as the same piece of software.

Had they not "integrated" the products, even if they had bundled them, they could have chosen to EOL the browser application version prior to the operating system.

I "use" my dial-up modem as a backup if my main internet connection goes down. It is good enough to check my e-mail and pull up Slashdot just to make sure the world hasn't ended. Last time I needed it was a few years ago during an extended outage. The backup dial up service is provided by my ISP at no extra charge.

Kids these days have their cell phones as "backup", but to me that is just not versatile enough to be the same.

And a nice thing about modems is it is still possible to connect to a remote computer without an ISP in the middle (yea, phone company, but still..)

Since you got me thinking about it, just to test, I am actually posting this from my dial-up!! (And no "no carrier" message so far, lol)

Isn't there an app so simulate arresting him? That sounds like it would have been more appropriate.

Keep in mind that Windows "8.1" is really just a service pack for Windows 8. Only the marketing department ran amok and decided to bump the version number to make it look like this "rapid release" shit.

It is hilarious watching all the betaz folks getting all crazy excited over a damn service pack.

when I need to find an app by name), I hit the Win key and start typing

Congratulations, you just rediscovered the command line.

Microsoft has changed UI name, seemingly due to trademark clash. It was even on /.

Since then "Metro" has taken on a slightly derogatory connotation for this user interface. Some who refer to it as Metro do so to be mildly insulting.

You know, Microsoft also tried to call it "Modern UI" for a while, which was very ironic since much of this design of full screen, typing commands in to a box, and memorizing key combinations is a major throwback to the DOS/Windows 1.x days.

I thought the plan was to keep the Windows 8 Numbering for now, and then push towards yearly updates for Microsoftâ(TM)s OS. In fact I thought that is what 8.1 was. I thought it was a great idea.

It is not a great idea. Unless they plan to give it away as an update to 8.0 users, (it is not quite 100% clear if they are going to do that), then they will fragment their market. And on the other hand even if they give it away, if they make more "above the hood" changes than a service pack would normally include, then it will likely break things for vendors and companies trying to support the platform.

But releasing every year gives the "latest and greatest" kids a hard on, so it must be the right thing to do, right?

During Windows 95 setup you could choose to use the Program Manager. No hacks or third party software needed. No such luck with Windows 8, it's either metro or the highway.

I remember how many problems the Start menu solved. When helping someone over the phone, Start -> Settings -> Control Pannel was ALWAYS in the same place. (No more finding the Program Manager window, clicking File->Run and then typing CONTROL.EXE !)

And if they wanted large icons, they could create a shortcut to the Start Menu folder on their desktop and browse it through Windows Explorer. - That is actually how early Chicago builds did it. Feels just like the Program Manager except no MDI window and more flexible.

The big problem with the Start Menu at the time was that vendors continued to organize things just like in the old Program Manager. That is, a program group for each program with a dozen different icons instead of just one icon in the root of the menu.

This reminds me more of what happened to the TI-99/4a right before TI dropped it and got out of the home computer market.

These things will be sitting in peoples attics for the next 30 years.

Not that anyone cares, but there was also a less common "Windows 3.1 for Workgroups" that bundled Microsoft's DOS network client, as well as a non "Workgroups" version of Windows 3.11. There was even a patch that updated the core Windows 3.1 files to the 3.11 versions. And on top of that, Windows 9x basically used the same protected-mode network stack as WFWG 3.11, just with a whole new UI so people thought it was completely different.

In a way, WFWG and Win9x was revolutionary at the time, as it meant people could easily share files and printers across a network without paying $$$$$$ for some big dedicated file server.

If you are going to encode it in a non human readable format, there is little point to storing it on hardcopy over electronic storage medium (hard disk, USB flash, floppy, etc). You will still need a computer to access it.

There are some fonts out there specifically designed for OCR, but in practice any little spec of dust or dirt can change how the computer reads it (an "O" can become a "Q" for example. And "1" is easily misread as "i" - in some fonts they are even 100% identical). So OCR is OK for text that you can spellcheck, but not for other kinds of data.

Depending on the kind of data, you could include something like a printed checksum to verify you read it write.

To conserve space, just make the fonts as small as you feel comfortable reading, use both sides of the paper, possibly reformat the data to utilize more space on the page, and use thin lightweight paper. And include an additional electronic backup so you don't have to bother OCRing until the world ends next Thursday.

They're only photographing the *outside* of the mail

Are you sure about that? It took this long to find out they were photographing the outside. They very likely do have some way to examine the general contents of the inside, probably using x-rays or something similar. And you can be sure any information gathered is also stored.

I remember when the original URL was http://altavista.digital.com/

In the early days it even recognized Pathworks Mosaic 1.0 by its user agent, and served up a really, really simple HTML page just for it.

There was even a Personal version of the search engine that you could download and run on your own server to index your Intranets.

Sad to see it go because the world really needs more diversity when it comes to search engines. If there is something the Big Engines don't want you to have, it might as well not exist.