Buy the new Smart Bulb App!!

Either the free version, where you can switch your light on and off after watching just one short commercial, or the Pay-By-Switch App for those people who don't switch their light on and off that often and want to save on monthly fees, or the $5 a month Flatrate-Switching App that let's you switch on and off your lights as often as you like without any additional fees !!!!

Depends on the device and the support you get for the device. Just think about it: Microsoft never did give any real "support" to you, most of the time they told you to go to your manufacturer for that. If the manufacturer of the $50,000 device still gives you support in the sense that he will fix any problems that occur with the device, including replacing the hardware that still runs Win98, that is more support that you have ever gotten and will ever get from Microsoft.

So, what makes one's opinion more worthy then another?

Hundreds of other blokes going "Hey, this guy is right, that also perfectly explains $other_problem I was having". a.k.a peer review.

Well, we know this is Slashdot and nobody really reads the articles, but if people did they would find out that it used a satellite uplink.

Backhaul to Vodafone is through the Cobham Explorer 500 Broadband Global Area Network, with communications being encrypted through IPsec.

In that vein, it might definitely be more interesting to see how past "futurist" have fared.

For example The Distance Learning School, where Kurd Lasswitz extrapolated from telephone/phonograph/televison technology of 1899 how "remote teaching" could look like in 1999.

If I want to run "the top 50 Android Apps" I would just get an Android phone. There is no real reason to have Ubuntu on a phone instead of Android if it's also targeted at the "Partners" and locks the end user out. I would like a Linux phone not because "it can do the same thing as Android", I would one want one if it can do MORE.

Well, one could use them in "lesser" competitions first. When I compare it to implementing a new OS version at the job:

1) Test in with test systems in test environments.
2) Install it on less important systems where downtimes are not mission critical.
3) Put it on the super-critical box that needs to run 24/7 or the company goes bust.

In this case of the Olympics there could of course have been the added "idea" that they wanted to surprise everyone with the super-secret new suit technology.

( On the for "Typical American" side of things, the FIRST thing that came to mind when I read the title was that some crazy patent-or-something lawsuit between Under Armour and Lockeed was blamed for the bad performance in some way. ;-) )

Exactly that. You have to see the pro/cons of security. If someone has physical access to your car and wants to mess with you, all the CAN-bus security in the world won't prevent him from snipping the break lines, drilling a hole in the bottom of your tank, or loosening the tire nuts.

And seeing how "security" at my computer sometimes prevents the legitimate user from doing stuff, I would really hate to get a "unauthorized brake attempt detected" error message when I slam on the breaks while seeing the tanker truck pull out of the side street.

Online Storage for Families would be great.

A place where you can store the kids in the cloud while you go on holiday. Or something where you can permanently dump the in-laws without hating to store them at home where they take up valuable space. Something that puts them in deep hibernation would be nice, so that the food cost don't run rampant.

But that's not really *random*. Perhaps an updated Navigation system will be able to pinpoint your location exactly just by analysing the frequency of the potholes you drive through.

Exactly. Especially when something goes wrong, and basically the only "error message" you get out of SSIS is something along the line of "something went wrong. Dunno what, dunno where, but something did"

And it looks real pretty, too, when it burns.

Although that's not a mountain, just wool. But, when you thing about it, a lump of wool sometimes just looks like the "cloud" that just burned up here.

After all, it's the first step of automating management, and replacing all that management types with a bunch of shell scripts.

And who gets to write those shell-scripts in the end? Who? Exactly, we, the techies.

So it may be a slight inconvenience for a time, but in the end we will only have to do what the shell scripts we wrote ourselves are telling us to do. Sounds pretty much like paradise to me.

Well, even if that is just "two hard" in comparison to the "one hard" of using the start menu, I would still choose the option that is less hard. If a new version is worse than the old, then there is no reason to switch in my mind.

And when I see the user base at our company, which freak out if the icons on their desktop change place, I can say that for at least 75% of that user base "just start typing" is *definitely* "too hard"

Linux users, as the article says, spent "years of tinkering" into getting a desktop to work exactly like we wanted.

That was achieved after some time. At least in my case, since about four years I have a desktop that exactly does what I want it to do exactly the way I want it to do it. So there is no longer a need for any big changes.

It's not that we "want or don't want change", it's just that we want change where it is needed, not change just for changes sake.