There are some recent Cisco home routers which do something like this. The router is packaged with a USB flash drive that you take around and plug into the various computers that you want to let access the network. I assume that in addition to the key, they also contain a Windows installer to make it idiotproof.

They are somewhat more expensive than a lowest-common-denominator Zyxel or store-brand router, but are probably the easiest way for the technically incompetent to set up a secure WLAN (short of just begging someone else to do it).

There are other wireless systems which use hardware addresses as part of their encryption scheme ... some of the PowerPlug home-networking devices (which are actually radio-based, but they transmit over copper power cabling) have a "security key" stamped on the bottom of the case on a sticker, next to the serial number. You have to give one unit the other unit's code in order to pair them (or something like that, it's been a while since I've set one up). It is a bit of a pain in the ass, but not complicated.

"Correct English" is just convention, and it's only convention because it was adopted in response to particular modes of transmission/distribution. Specifically in the case of the quotation rule, I've always been told that it was to prevent punctuation from disappearing visually into the whitespace at the edges of a typeset newspaper column. It's an obsolete rule kept alive by people who care more about convention than clarity.

What you're espousing is nothing more than tradition for the sake of tradition. Unlike spelling or grammar-nazism, which at least are defensible since they make communication easier by reducing ambiguity, universally enforcing the punctuation-inside-quotes rule actually causes confusion. The British or logical-punctuation style is better by virtually any measure in effectively communicating the author's meaning.

Unless you're hand-setting type, it's a silly anachronism. It's time to let it go.

> But my sample may be skewed because most of the people I know with Macs are trying to get work done with them.

Even as an attempt at trolling that doesn't make a lot of sense; the only reason you'd want to boot a Mac directly into Windows anymore is because (A) you're so cheap you can't or won't buy a virtualization app, or (B) you're playing a really resource-intensive game and want maximum fps or something.

Neither of those are particularly common situations among business users or developers, at least not during work hours. I know a lot of people who have Macs as their everyday computers: almost all of them, to my knowledge, use VMWare. Maybe a few people have Parallels, but VMWare is much more common in my experience. (I could believe that this is a network-effect situation though, where people use VMWare if everyone they know uses VMWare because they want to be able to easily pass virtual machine images around. Maybe somewhere there are similar clusters of Parallels users.) Nobody reboots directly into Windows, at least not without a lot of cursing and swearing.

I do know a lot of people who have a Mac but also keep an inexpensive Windows laptop around, or less commonly have a Windows box they regularly VNC into, as an alternative to or in addition to virtualization.

Boot Camp was interesting when it was introduced but rebooting is such a pain in the ass I can't imagine anyone using it very often, outside of niche applications like gaming. The virtualization systems are good, and Wintel laptops so cheap, that very few people I know are willing to shut down everything they're doing in order to reboot and test something in Windows, or run a Windows-only app. Better to have a dedicated Windows machine, whether physical or virtual.

No, NAT is not a good way to handle it.

NAT works -- it's not good, but I will at least agree with you that it functions in some minimal way -- for small networks. But it doesn't work for large ISPs. Comcast has already realized this and gotten on the IPv6 bus, although it's going to cost them. If NAT were feasible, I'm sure they'd do it. But they can't without segmenting their network, which is as much a PITA for them from a management perspective as it would be for their customers.

Eventually the wireless telcos and other ISPs are going to run into the same issues, although their networks are designed differently so they might have a while left. But it's not like networks are in general going to get smaller. People want more and more devices online, and they want those devices to be able to talk to each other.

When you start layering NAT, what you end up with is still a network of sorts, but it's not the Internet. Lots of traditional Internet applications don't work, and worse than that, a great many applications that might be designed in the future won't be, because the architecture of the network will be so limiting. We could quite possibly nerf what has been the greatest wealth generator and communications tool since the printing press, if we build client/server assumptions in so deeply that it's impossible to ever move on from them. Just because the Internet today is principally client/server doesn't mean that it must or should always be.

I'm not a big fan of IPv6. It looks like a bloated piece of shit, frankly, and I've always been disappointed that they didn't go for a more elegant backwards-compatible extension of the address space rather than a forklift upgrade. If the people designing color TV had taken the same route, we'd all still be watching in black and white. But it's here now, and the alternatives are worse.

Kinda-sorta.

OS X on PPC would run Classic (pre-OSX) apps, but did so by actually running OS 9. It was similar to VMWare Fusion works on Intel Macs today. OS 9 was actually running, but the desktop was hidden and OS 9 apps were each given their own window so that they seemed to play alongside OS X native apps. If you wanted to, you could display the OS 9 desktop or even reboot directly into OS 9 (if you needed to run a game or something else that couldn't tolerate the overhead of OS X).

It was pretty ugly and a lot of people swore off using it as soon as they could; having the Classic environment running soaked up a lot of resources on typical hardware at the time. It was certainly not a seamless attempt at backwards compatibility in the way that Windows has typically at least tried to maintain (at the expense of being uglier in other ways, granted).

Because presumably they have no interest in giving them back?

You have no leverage to force companies to do that. The original Class A allocations were not made under the same terms that modern allocations are made under (where you're basically being loaned the addresses). They really own them, in the sense that anyone can own something that doesn't really exist.

Migrating them off of those addresses would be expensive. Who's going to pay for that? Unless they're going to be compensated for their effort I can't imagine they're going to be really interested.

Plus, as time goes on, those addresses are going to be valuable. People sitting on those old allocations might as well be sitting on gold mines. Why would they want to give them away?

Given the price of storage, it doesn't make sense to spend a lot of time (potentially any time at all) sorting through messages by hand, deciding what to save, if you can just as easily archive all of them and then search for the ones you want later. Unless you put a very low value on your time, you can buy a lot of disk for an hour's worth of sorting.

Ubuntu on PPC is "community supported" as opposed to officially supported by Canonical. I'm not sure that it makes that much difference in practice; I suspect that many of the fixes that you'd care about are applied to upstream (the Linux kernel) and end up working on both platforms equally well.

You can get it here:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PowerPCDownloads

Alternately you can install plain-Jane Debian instead of Ubuntu, which is supported on PPC to the same extent as it is supported on any other platform. Arguably this is equal to Ubuntu's "community support," but if it helps to not feel like you're on a second-tier platform, that might be the route to go.

"Legacy bullshit" is Microsoft's stock in trade. That's what they are. Windows is the win32 API; IE is IE6-style HTML. That's the core of their business, why it's so hard to get rid of them. Lots of people would like to be rid of Windows and move onto a platform that's less of an attack vector, but nearly everyone has some shitty old application somewhere that they can't do without and Windows provides a good upgrade path, or at least better than anyone else. IE may be a shitty browser but it works on a lot of shitty intranet sites that were designed for IE6 and that nobody can afford to fix now, and probably won't be fixed for a decade at least.

If they decided to pull an Apple and just say "screw you, everyone who built stuff for the old API, you're dead to us," they'd be torn apart by the market as a thousand little competitors jumped in and tried to get in on everyone who'd been left behind. (Apple only gets away with it because they're small enough, and cater mostly to home users with shallow pockets, that nobody really caters to the people who get screwed by the Steve Jobs Upgrade Treadmill.)

It's Microsoft's blessing and the key to their success, but it's also their curse and will probably be their eventual downfall. They can toss billions of dollars around and try to get the greatest programmers in the world, but they're always going to be hampered by the thing they can't (or are unwilling) to change -- the legacy cruft that gives them real vendor lock-in, or at least a huge advantage over all comers.

I did this a few weeks ago and Microsoft makes it intentionally difficult — first, most casual users don't even know that the "Find more providers" list is there. Second, it's not obviously clear that you'd use the "Find more providers" option to change providers; i.e. get rid of Bing completely and use Google instead, rather than add additional options to the menu. Third, if and when you do get to the Microsoft page of search providers, when I went there, Google wasn't even on the front page. It took a number of subsequent clicks to even find it, which seems totally inappropriate given Google's popularity.

This is 100% the usual Microsoft monopoly-leveraging SOP.

Well, I think you answered your own question -- most "premium" smartphones are 3-5x the cost or have an expensive monthly contract, and have a fraction of the screen area. I own one and use it, but it's not exactly an ideal device for reading or marking-up documents on. It's not even very pleasant to browse the web on; the only reason I use it for that purpose is when I'm stuck somewhere, bored, and don't have anything better. A small netbook-sized tablet, something that could fit easily into a small briefcase (or, for a significant percentage of the population, the purse/handbag they're probably already carrying), bigger than the iPod Touch but smaller than a laptop and easier to use without setting it on something, would be pretty handy.

> Part of that maybe the problem (no intelligence in the infrastructure).

That's entirely the problem. In order to have rates vary with time of day, you need a "smart meter" that can track when you're consuming the power. Most older electric meters are just clockwork mechanisms with no way to do this.

This is changing, slowly. The two big benefits (in terms of energy savings) you get from smart meters are peak/off-peak rate structuring, and reverse metering. The latter -- the ability to use solar panels or some other source and sell power back to the grid -- is the most frequently-cited benefit, but the peak/off-peak rates are probably more important. Anything that encourages users to switch their consumption to off-peak can have huge benefits. (Some "peak load" plants are among the worst sources of power, in terms of carbon emissions, and they only get turned on when necessary. Push consumption into the off-peak hours and they can stay turned off.)

I think you would be rather silly to start investing in battery systems before getting rid of the electric heat. A compressor-based system of some sort -- whether an air or geothermal heat pump system -- would almost certainly net you more energy and cost savings, and use technology that exists right now.

Many US households are in your situation; they haven't really gotten after the "low-hanging fruit" that you could do without any additional technology. There are a ton of houses with electric-resistive heat or terribly inefficient fossil-fuel furnaces, combined in many cases with poor insulation, that haven't been upgraded to currently-available (in some cases, last-generation) energy saving technologies.

The "whole house battery" is interesting, but it would be a pretty rare house in the US that has done everything else that would represent a more effective use of funds for energy/cost savings. Most people would probably save more money with less investment just buy buying a new furnace or water heater.

Clearly, you've gone to a lot of effort to make sure your application fits in the hardware footprint you have for it. While I applaud that on technical grounds, I question it from a business perspective; particularly in the early stages of a startup, it might be a much better use of resources to work on features or other things that will appeal to customers, rather than on extensive tweaks or ground-up custom coding. That's the sort of thing you can do later, when you have money coming in.

The advantage of EC2 and other services like it is that they let you get a product out in front of customers, hopefully generating revenue, very quickly and with little upfront cost (either in hardware or in development time/effort), which you can scale out linearly as demand requires. Once you have something out there and are generating revenue, there are often better hosting options and lots of ways to improve performance.

There's a lot of risk in producing a highly tweaked, built-from-scratch application before you have users and cash coming in. If the project or company fails, that's a lot of time wasted. Cloud services allow what are sometimes little more than "working proof-of-concept" apps to go live, and then be improved iteratively if they actually make money (or attract more VC cash, as the case sometimes seems to be...).

I'm sure there are a lot of people who aren't fans of that development or business model, but it's pretty close to dominant in the startup world and that's where I see a lot of cloud services being used right now.