Of course, I love the idea: software that fixes its own problems. However, it sounds like something from science fiction requiring machines with human-like intelligense monitoring and fixing themselves. Has anyone used IBM’s autonomic computing toolkit? Does it work?
Since it became obvious very early to me that geeks of the #2 sort find it nearly impossible to get girls, I learned in college to hide my geekness in mixed company (mostly : ). For example, I absolutely have to have a cell phone small enough for my front pocket because the Batman utility belt look just doesn’t say “breed with me.”
On the other hand, geeks of the #2 sort are the ones that keep a Star Trek convention going every weekend of the year somewhere on the planet, fill comic book conventions and, apparently, teach physics based on why Krypton just *had* to explode. You gotta respect someone that’s willing to embrace their true inner self to the point of risking their ability to even practice contributing to the genepool…
On a side note, I’ve loving this blog thing. I used to have to wade through tons of noise on mailing lists and newsgroup or meet up with my DevelopMentor colleagues at some conference to get this kind of nugget. Now, because blog software is so cheap and easy and my friends are hopelessly wordy, I can listen to the signal only and spend the rest of the day with my family.
At Demo, Robert finds Akimbo, which marries a Personal Video Recorder to the video content currently being produced for the Internet. For those Internet programs that haven’t already done so, I assume that they’ll be adding commercials, but right now, this is what cable used to be before they started charging me a monthly rate to watch ads. I don’t know anything about pricing and I’d like to be able to try it out on my PC first w/o any extra hardware, but Akimbo seems like the next logical step of turning any TV into a view on a/v content, whether it’s live or cached, broadcast or downloaded.
The final step, I think, is to be able to consume any of my cached a/v from any PC/TV in my house, whether the a/v is cached manually by ripping a CD or DVD or whether it’s cached automatically via a hunk of PVR software running on a server. Can I do that today w/o spending thousands of dollars? Is the XBox Media Center Extender the answer?
As I’ve always suspected, authors are posting their own reviews on Amazon. It’s that anon thing — gets you ever time. Of course, they justify their actions because anonymous folks get to say bad things about their books and they need to defend themselves (the other side of the anon coin).
For the record (although how can you really trust a statement like this?), I never post reviews on my own books and I always put my name on any review or feedback I give of any kind. I do shamelessly ask for reviews when I get emails about my book, but at least I’m open about it. : )
As a computer boy and a producer of words in a row (and a frustrated novelist), I found Cory Doctorow’s thoughts on eBooks specifically and copyright in general to be very interesting. Don't know that I agree, but what fun is it to only consume content with which you agree? That's why I always listen to Rush when I can. : )
