Yes, I've read that. I'm waiting for the punchline, (like, you have to use gestures to log in! C'mon it'll be fun!) but what I've heard so far make me cautiously hopeful. I'm fine with 7 for now, but know I need to upgrade eventually, probably to 9 when it's on SP2 or 3, and when 10 comes out and is obviously a POS. And then, we wait until 11...

Yeahhhhh.... we're staying on Server 2008 until Server 2012 or some future version behaves in a reasonable fashion.

Must have: Useable start menu, (a button to dump us into the "start screen" was just plain insulting) a useable desktop, and the ability to not run any metro (or whatever it's called) apps whatsoever.

Important but not a deal killer: Put all the control panel functions back in the control panel. You can keep the charms bar for tablet compatibility, but I'd want some way to turn it off on a desktop. In fact, I would like a way to turn off all hot corners, hot sides, and swiping gestures while on a KVM machine. Registry changes to do this would be fine, as I would intend to do it once and never revert back.

...no.

Unless you finagle your way into management.

Wait, now that I think about it, we might be thinking along legacy lines. Perhaps the future is more like: managers with liberal arts degrees presiding over completely outsourced technical resources.

Maybe I should go back to school and major in art history.

Thank you. I didn't understand his response either.

...and I could possibly think of a few from that time, but they were rare.

I think I disagree. Read any Heinlein, Asimov, Smith, Anderson, Blish, Simak, Van Vogt, Cutner, during the "golden age" in the 1940's and 1950's, up to maybe 1964. Generally positive in outlook. A positive view of the future is not something Star Trek invented -- it was par for the course up until the mid sixties. If anything, Star Trek in 1966 was riding the trailing edge of that positive outlook in scifi, before everything turned dreadfully depressing.

Life does tend to imitate art, although the cycles are a few decades out of sync.

Anyone remember the seventies pre-Star Wars? You couldn't produce an SF film unless it had a downer ending. The magazine of fantasy and science fiction was full of depressing dystopian stories. Dangerous Visions, Last Days of Man on Earth, Driftglass... The book stands were loaded with depressing scifi. It wasn't a particularly uplifting time. I remember wondering at the time whether the industry go through cycles, where to differentiate yourself you have to write depressing fiction, and then everyone follows along, and then to differentiate yourself you have to go with, I dunno, a happy ending, and everyone follows suit, back and forth. Or whether literature and media tend to track some manic-depressive cycle of society. Or drives it.

In my experience, even blu-ray isn't big enough. And it's really slow. Raw hard drives are cheap enough that it makes sense to use them as backup media. (Just don't drop one.)

Agreed. Mirroring is not a backup either, because data corruption or erroneous deletion happens on both drives.

A true backup goes to media (which could be another drive) which is then disconnected from the computer and stored somewhere else. The further away (within reason) the better.

A good plan might be to cultivate a friend who also has data he doesn't want to lose, and store each other's backups, thus protecting both of you from local disaster (like a house fire).

Are you speaking from experience?

As a photographer with over 100k clicks on three bodies, I have just over 2 TB of my own photos on a dedicated drive. I have a two step backup system:

1) With a USB "drive toaster", perodically back up my files to a raw drive, mark it with a sharpie, and put it on the shelf in a different part of the house.

2) About twice a year, ghost my primary storage to a brand new drive, install the new drive in place of the old drive, mark the old drive with a sharpie, drive it over to a friend's house and put it in his fire safe. This serves as my hardware refresh and disaster recovery.

The older drives from previous backups in his safe are repurposed for music/movie storage, or used to rebuild PCs for other family members.

Were I really serious, I'd also mirror my primary storage, but at some point you have to say "this is good enough". Besides, any photos I've published exist on various websites, and I can always fetch copies from there in an emergency.

I suppose that's true, but to foil the "go home" you'd have to jam GPS as well as control signals. And the obvious counter to that is inertial guidance.

So has the iphone. It's just an iphone. Other than color, all iterations of a model are, and must always be, exactly the same. I guess there's a lesson for kids in there somewhere.

You're right. And as I said in another response, I'm thinking that media drones will also get a legal pass, as long as they're not used to embarrass the police, by, you know, exposing their misuse of surplus military equipment, as just one example.