A communications disruption can only mean one thing...

Look around the internet and see if you can find some free virtual machines somewhere that you can download. Vmware used to offer some, I expect the still do. Go with whatever software the VM is made for. Just to get your feet wet, to get you an idea of whats going on. You can branch out from there. There are lots of virtualization suites. Once you are comfortable playing with those, try building one yourself. It's not difficult, but having an example to refer might be helpful. It's not that hard, but good luck anyway.

The Roku is great, I've had one since just before the version 2 came out. I love that thing. Netflix + Amazon Prime gives me most everything. Then a piece of software called Playon.tv allows me to pull streams through the old windows box in the corner, transcode, and stream to the roku. Any file that you can watch in VLC, you can stream through playon to your roku...though it does seem to have some problems with certain types of mkv files.

You know, All of this is kind of silly. We all know what's going to happen here. The printers raise their rates to handle the reduced amount of printing they are doing. In order to cope, they publishers have to raise their rates. If they raise the price on the paperbacks, no one will buy them, so they raise the price of the ebooks, driving folks to buy more paperback books cause they are cheaper. As people make the switch back to paperbacks, the cost of the ebook will go down for the same reason.

We are talking about a market that in the grand scheme, is really just starting. Think about how long books have been around, how long people have been selling books. Books won't be going anywhere for a long time. I think that a few things need to happen yet with ebooks before we can really see a change. A universal reader needs to be created and a universal drm free format needs to be created. I need to be able to walk into any store, and purchase an ebook, and that book needs to be able to open on any and all devices that I have. And a real method needs to be created for sharing ebooks. Finally, I think all these technology companies apple and sony, and google, need to get their hands out of the book/ebook market and get back to making devices and let the booksellers publishers figure this one out.

At the end of the day, people as a species will always love stories, and people will continue to consume stories in which ever way they are most comfortable with. If it were up to me, I'd say, just price them all the same. Hardback, paperback, ebook, audio book, whatever. And lets see where the market takes us.

So for their next trick, add some swarm theory in there so the carts bring themselves in from the parking lot.

Its interesting to me all this about something that still hasn't come out yet. Next week we will see if the hype is really worth anything. I think no matter what, the Kindle will sell very well. Priced only $50 higher than the touch, its easy for people to just go for one bigger. I have an old sony ereader from a few years ago. Doesn't hold a charge. I'll definitely be looking at what comes out next week. What I would really like to see though is a a universal ebook format and some sort of generic system where I can purchase books from any vendor I want. This app, or that app, its not good enough. It needs to be unified. Honestly though, as far as tablets go, I don't quite think we are there yet. A few more generations, and maybe we will get there. But for this Christmas, I think we all need to remember. Nook vs Fire. They are color ebook readers, that also have tablet functionality. That is a bit different than the higher end tablets that run the nook and kindle apps.

I guess they want to come out with a new "metro"-version.

I'm not so much worried about MSFT requiring OEMs to use the secure boot feature to lock out the owner, but instead I am worried that the oem's will drop UEFI on the hard disk in a hidden partition, instead of storing it on the motherboard in a non-volitaile state. Wiping your hard disk when installing a new OS, or re-imaging a computer could have disastrous effects.

...Already I don't keep any files on my ubuntu machine. Re-installing an OS every 6 months can make it difficult to actually use. Monthly releases will just cause a huge fragmentation issue. I would prefer a yearly release, with other substantial updates throughout the year that can just be downloaded. We could call them service pack's or something. The proposer's proposal actually makes sense though...it's not so much the release schedule that needs to change, but the way that canonical's developers have to get their not truely stable code into a release before its ready so that they can get paid. If the dev's need more time, then canonical should give it to them. After all, isn't the point to build a great working OS and not a semi-working one?

I have lost several purchased computers to lightning, but never one that I built. Never lost one to old age...their tasks just become less and less over time. Still have an old P120 (thats pentium 120 mhz for you younguns). Runs WinME. Only machine I've ever seen run WinME without crashing. Dunno why.

In a university environment, we tend to have to pick and choose the frequency at which we release updates to software. We had not yet even finished testing 4, and now 5 is out, and 4 won't be getting updates. No harm done, but there could be a situation where we deploy a version of Firefox, and then cannot update that version for quite some time. Maybe a couple of months, maybe a semester. It gets interesting when your users see the media hype about the new version and want the new version, but we can't go to it yet. If Mozilla is going to follow Google's chrome like release cycle, then I do wish they would quiet their releases down a bit.