Hypertext. It's still beautiful

mwesch have done a brilliant narration that captures some of the important ideas of how hypertext (that is, the internet) is interesting and important. I also love the Matrix-like hinting. Kudos!

IE conspiracy redux

I just realized, visiting the launch page of MSN 8.0, that the IE conspiracy is even more insidious than previously imagined on my part.

It's common knowledge that the company with the biggest development budget provide a browser that's definitely flawed. Time after time. It'd be a little ironic, the problems Microsoft seem to have, making a set of readily available standards, even with numerous open-source implementations (it's possible to sneak a peek, if the going gets tough). Even with heckloads of cash it seem MSFT is unable to come up with a product that performs well in the face of competition. It'd be (sort of) fun, if it were plain old stupidity that caused this. Alas! It's very unlikely that this is the whole cause of all the standards-trouble.

Being market leader with a de-facto-monopoly status,(monopolies are on a theoretical basis assumed to be detrimental to both quality and price. Microsoft would have trouble to argue that this ain't true in practice.) open standards, and thus a playing field open to all, is 100% un-desirable for someone who've grown accustomed to not having real competition. The mangled support for web standards in the most popular browser family have slowed development of open web technology incredibly much.

The question for me have been; what is their alternative? Open standards should be a 'natural development' of web technology if they prove to be useful. Right. Right?!

Not so. What you can see from the MSN-launch page, is that whenever the PR-dudes at Microsoft wants REAL WORK(tm) done, they go for Flash content. For those of ou who fail to see any significance in this consider the following. Microsoft guys have slowed down the development of open standards on the web single-handedly, and when they want to do a high-profile page, they choose not to use the exact standards other people have problems implementing in a sane way, and instead go for the Adobe (nee. Macromedia) Flash format.

Now they've created a incredible logical bypass of everything open and free, and right on to another proprietary standard. That'd be a very fine maneuver to extend internet functionality, after the Internet Explorer embrace have been on-going for nearly a decade.

Re: The Pencil Drop. Have pencil, need money.

Just as Seth Godin just mentioned. Link-aggregating services (like digg, Reddit, delicious +++) are vulnerable to something he elegantly names The Pencil Drop. In short an organized spamming effort to get cheap traffic.

This instantly hits home with me, as I've noticed thatYouTube actually _feels_ less INTERESTING after being bought up by Google. I suspect this is caused by stronger integration with traditional media industry, and thus feeding me more oldschool 'promotional content'.

I realize this is a highly subjective opinion, but I've got the feeling something fairly similar can happen to decent link-aggregators out there.

A really funny example of this (as of the time of this wring), can be seen as the top entry of del.icio.us front page. The link page shows only that 160(at the time of writing) or so users needed add the page 'Swiwel.com: Coming soon' on del.icio.us. The page, at the time were empty sans logo and a promise of 'Coming soon'.

How could an essentially empty site with placeholder logo and no real content be added as a top entry to delicious? Take a quick look at the first tags and comments and tell me whether or not this could just as well be performed as a text-book Pencil-for-Money operation.

A quick surf prove that the sudden spike of attention (and present lack of content) is because of articles launched regarding the imminent launch of Swivel. A quick look of when links were added to delicious: Nov'05 One, Mar'06 One, Dec'06 160 and counting).. At least one article promising this to be a 'YouTube for data' over at Tech Crunch is one of the sources of attention. Case closed, mystery solved. But the fact remains that it could just as well have been pulled off as a one man Pencil Operation.

The availability of links offering easy connection to aggregation sites, like 'Digg this' offers an explanation to the quick response at aggregation sites like delicious. But the flash crowd-like response, and self-sustaining traffic from aggregator sites mean that there will be a 'demand' side to Pencil Drop-operations in the future. It will be 'interesting' to see how this will work out in the long run, for sure.

As a side note; I couldn't find any comment function in the original blog post (incidentally also found via popurls), and had to bother writing this up and whipping up a Trackback from this blogger post. This should be proof enough that the spam-mafia is hard at work, and successfully disruptive in making comments useless for low-maintenance websites.

Open letter to EMI Records Ltd.

Dear EMI Music,

I have apparently bought a medium that will not play music on my primary music system (Ubuntu Dapper Drake 6.06).

This is MOST CERTAINLY not the the behaviour I have expected at the time of purchase, as it was sold in a manner decieptively like regular CD's are traded.

The purchase of item 'Kraftwerk - Minimum-Maximum' was made under obviusly false assumptions, and was caused by LACK OF PROPER MARKINGS ON the sold 'Copy Control' medium.

I can bear not being able to hear the music, but the fact that I have been misled to spend an unreasonable amount of money for a service not delivered, grieves me deeply.

If you could,

A. Provide future releases of NON STANDARD media with CLEARLY LEGIBLE markings
B. Provide me with digital copy for the contents now unaccessibe (or thorough directions of aquiring the same)
or
C. Provide means of reversing the transaction that have taken place, where I get to keep my money, and EMI Records Ltd. can have another go at sellig the afforementioned album

, I would see this matter as resolved and refrain from further complaints whatsoever.

If solutions A to C seem unreasonable and impossible to implement, the least that I will settle for is an apology.

Sincerely Yours,
John Random

The best is yet to come.. by default!

Tech is a fabulous field to dive deep into. Because it changes, fast. And it's this that also bugs me sometimes. It is sometimes too much. Personally I'd really appreciate to at least have some warning beforehand. If only I'd have some opportunity to really wait for and rejoice the day it really materialize.. Like this multi-touch technology.




Somehow this makes me feel old.

Boy, oh boy, do i regret not spending enough time writing tech-posts predictinng future trends online. Robert X. Cringley just mentioned a bit more fleshed-out version of something I thought of sometime late 2004.

I'd feel a bit better about myself having that sort of idea written out, and verifiable somewhere. The line "Oh well, they might finally be catching on to the idea" isn't big or important, but would have made my day, for sure.

Anyways. The idea I got about film distribution is as follows:


I was aquainted with the iPod, probably of 20 or 40 Gb storage space, and had rented/bought lots of DVD's around that time. Considering the extreme amount of space available on such a tiny device, I still find it ridiculous that it's mainly marketed for distribution and rendering of music. About that time I also found one of the video stores with a DVD/VHS rental automat outside, complete with support for plastic payment and return slots for both VHS and DVD. Nice, only, it just seemed so completely useless, and 2-3 years late, since an DVD and especially the VHS are stupid technology for content distribution. They wear and break down after use. Since a full DVD take some 4.7Gb of data, even the smallest iPod would take several times its own weight and volume of DVD quality movies, it seemed like a no-brainer to introduce handheld mass storage devices for rental movie distribution. Somewhat exited, I couldn't wait for that to happen. But I still am.


Enter the iPod rent-O-rama:

The technical challenges might be a bit steeper than I care to think of, but the concept of the iPod as a video rental tool it quite simple. Whip up a serverbased video rent-O-mat with creditcard payment (maybe even coin or support, but that adds some unwanted security concerns) fiber-optical and power in from the back. The fiber-optics is the most obvious technology, but new content can be distributed by wireless technologies at as low speed as you want. Payment is really simple to do over GSM or other mobile networks. Transfer via iPod interface is the only new feature that needs some working out.

Being unfamiliar with the iPod interface, but assuming it runs at at least 400Mbps, a DVD could at worst take 95 seconds to transfer. DRM should be pretty simple, being in full control of the player hardware, it should not be too difficult to come up with a something that does what it's supposed to. Choice of rental duration and codec quality could be selectet at before payment. Both re-coding of DRM tokens, and watermark embedding should be able to tie the movie to a specific hardware item (the actual iPod), even optional advertisements connected to a rebate.

Secure storage of the content on the will be Apple's responsibility to decide over, but seeing the current standards are good enough for RIAA, Hollywood should be able and willing to go along with it.

The actual decoding of the movie could happen in the iPod, or, the easy route, packed into a souped-up version of the AV-dock (it already comes with Apple Remote, it lacks slightly more gearing towards Hi-Fi). The current iPod interface should be able to stream data quick enough for DVD-quality movies. For portability, a full-fledged DVD-decoder, or even worse HDTV capable circutry is a bit tough to pack into such a tiny device. To just treat the iPod as a dumbed down, portable storage is better for high-quality movies, since the main unit will be cheaper, and the regular user NEVER EVER consider watching hi-fi movies on the go. A sleek-ass dongle in spirit of Monster's FM transponder would be ideal as a connector to TV/projection units. It might not be the route Apple wants to go, but it sure would be effective.


I agree very much with the views of Mr Cringely that the ability to refill the iPod from geographical outlets are a great move to reach a new marked shares that don't currently have access to 10Gb+ DSL internet, or even own a computer (think big, the latter is still majoriy). There WILL be some years still, before 70% of iPod owners have internet access that can compete with physical links like USB or fiber-optical technology.

But i disagree on one thing the ideal partner for Apple isn't Blockbuster, for exactly the reasons he state.

The format of an ideal outlet would be a stylish automat with pilot-placements in large shopping centers, but eventually placed virtually _everywhere_ at the request of property owners in exchange of a fixed sum of money. An ideal partner should have previous experience in vending machine operations, and a rock solid brand name.

That ideal partner would be: Coca-Cola.




(I know about the Pepsi + iTunes, but I swear, I _have_ seen a co-branded 'Nano-Cola',more on that later)

Declining value of Internet real estate?

It's not breaking news, but it's a trend that I've seen lately:

Trying to remember the actual adress for a given web-site (and maybe miss), takes more time than just googling the right keywords in the first place.

Dot com domains are popular, all right, but the ratio of good, free domain names to taken ones are getting worse all the time.. Wich makes the lengths some people go to to secure themselves a pristine domain prospect seem somewhat disproportionate. There are at least ten new TLD's in the process of being reviewed for acceptance at all times.. It's not that we have all the TLD's we will ever need. But it's getting kind of ridiculous with all the new proposed top-levels.. Who REALLY needs another .pro, .museum, .coop or .aero? Not to mention the slightly funny .xxx? Porn sites already account for a sizeable chunk of the registered .com adresses, and it's not like we're out of variations of surefire words like (hot, slutty, steaming, grand-, midgets) .com just yet.. If people wanted an .com adress they could, and still will, get an, at pretty nice entry-level prices too. I got myself a prefectly okay (albeit nonce-word-ish) adress for a price of less than a cinema ticket, a year!

Adresses are pretty cheap to begin with, but still, the price some of the most expensive adresses are pretty silly, $7,5 million (pre-bubble in 1999, but still.. prices are climbing yet again) for business.com is a bit more than I can bring myself to believe.

A serious name is important, but most i find .com adresses a bit overrated, as the uniqueness of them are declining all the time.

There are lots of alternative names, or if one choose to think outside the .com box. The way the most popular TLD's are unique will be diluted by more extensive population of other TLD's.

Another thing that have annoyed me slightly (and for some webmasters, caused much grief), is the practice of domain kiting and sniping. Two minutes of late pay, and someone else suddely have all your visitors. It have removed my favourite oldschool game website from its dot-com adress to [new-adress].org, and always causes me to miss the first or second try, every once in a while i pop in.

Wich is reason for even more irritation. When the wrong URL is entered, an obviously low quality, portal-cum-searchengine pops up. It is even more aggravating than the blank bowserpage for empty urls. Every moment spent on that site is effectively a waste of my own time, it usually makes me spend from 5 seconds up to a minute minutes, to see what kind of page i have surfed onto. The other problem is that I'm generating money for those domain-sning webmasters..

It's really annoying Bob too. It is a largescale machinebased exploitation of the domain naming system, and what's more, in the long term, it would really benefit the domain name industry if there were real content on those pages, since all the current state of affairs do for me as a internet user, is to deflate a given domain name's value. Wich again put even more power in the hands of search engines. (Not bad per se, I really don't like the way it is happening).

Yet another case of dumb abuse defeating an open system?

TV, meet Internet..

I've been giving this some thought, lately, as have a great deal other people. It could be that great minds think alike, but personally I believe it to be more like the next logical step..

One of the most interesting market places, for vendors of PC hardware to conquer and dominate, is the TV/HiFi sphere of the modern living room. As a content delivery platform the classic multimedia have several inherent qualities. The one that probably sits best with potential investors, is that there are several established means to generate revenue from content delivery to TVs and HiFi music systems, the customers are accustomed to spend good money on this platform, and to pay a reasonable premium for superior quality.. Either fact can easily be taken advantage of,-and expanded upon by new hardware/content solutions made possible in by new technology popularized in this domain.

Traditional video rentals, livingroom TV programming, and music collections represent brand new markets to take sizeable chunks of. This also represents a demographic that have lower usage of the internet, as opposed to users of emerging multimedia delivery through regular consumer PC's.

The hardware implementations have to be simple to operate, and provide visible advantages over traditional solutions, and have the more powerful technology it relies on be as invisible as possible. A bit unusual design philosophy for the PC industry, but deep technical insight into quatitative differences of different specs will be less important, and ease-of-use and design of both hardware, and software interfaces will be even more important.

Digital Video Recorders on the market are a good leap in the right direction, but still, this is still mostly enhancements to existing use of television - programming. The ability to choose how to, and when to view TV content at one's own will, empowers the consumer, and have caused grief among excisting broadcasting players, as it directly threatens to erode the TV advertizing market.

The corporate upside of these emerging possibilities, will be new ways to get content for the TV/HiFi. One possibility will be users building up libraries of content for their own enjoyment, with an obvious market of private multimedia servers placed in the private network. This scenario screams for actual working implementations of copy protection, but a wild guess on my part will be that this IS a wanted feature by many, as people tend to like the ability to do whatever they please with stuff they have saved.

The logic that consumers can pay for access is easy, or rental of physical media is an established in the minds of people. Expiring rights to use of non-physical digital content is NOT an established way to do business, so pay-per-view solutions WILL have problems gaining support, as long as the technology supports storing of streamed media. And content provision platforms that don't support the 'save' feature will face serious problems if any competition still have this offer.

Microsoft is well into this with their XP Mediacenter Edition. Along with the CCD-revolution (digital video, and digital photography is dirt cheap, and very nearly the standard way to ) they have got some of the most obvious ideas of integrating presentation of private video and pictures, devcent ability to manipulate, view, and store digital media, but also the idea of distributing the content over local network by browsing, and viewing withMedia Center Extenders.

This is not exactly news, as early versions have been arond since at least 2004, but with more functionality built in, by every version. Seeing as Microsoft have made available Media Center Extender addons for both XBoxes, these devices will fast reach a mature and very competitive level. Within a couple of years I expect a incredibly sleek cabinet, like an extremely slim DVD-player, intuitively administered with a handy remote, whose main goal is to stream and output decent-quality multimedia to both TV, and HiFi equipment.

Whatever possibilities the playback hardware will bring, there WILL be a rising demand for quicker consumer internet access wich could make fiber directly to the consumers more competitive over plain old telephone wiring. Another educated guess, is that demand for home networking and storage capacity will be quite strong for a long time to come.

This will be a 'new' mainstream market and tight and effective integration with hardware and content solutions will make the digital media package easy to accept as a whole. Exactly who comes out on top is difficult to say for sure, but good old Microsoft HAVE a lot of able equipment as of now, and have probably learned a couple of lessons in other battlefields wich will be put to good use in the fight for the home theatre.

Nifty stuff

I just found out that Jef isn't among us anymore. But also that he used to one helluva guy.

He has this enormous list of achievements that just goes on and on, and really make me feel like there should be MORE healthy, productive time to the disposition of some people. Anyways, I'll be checking out the nifty tool Archy he was developing until the very end.

It kinda promises a lot more of what I really need. Zen calm and a problem-free environment to punch out ideas, and be creative in. Less pont and click, more straight-on keyboard-punching, and standarized rules for quick handling. Oh yes. And the notion that it should be IMPOSSIBLE for the computer to 'lose' some of your work. Ever. I just observe that blogger seems to have implemented a feature that promises NOT to loose work-in-progress, wich is a HUGE improvement over regular web interfaces (see earlier post '>:( .

Oh. And this must be the best concept ever: Theory of the week! it's just a little bit dead there, but the information is still good; Brook's law: "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later". That's a notion I can second, and a very counter-intuitive, yet very logical phenomenon.

It also explains software projects tendency to fail disastrously when they first fail. Great fun!

Solid state, baby, solid state!

Oh joy, oh joy! One of the more interesting piece of news I've the storage industry lately (not counting yet-to-come miracle technologies) is from [www.gigabyte.com] the next step (it's really more like a giant leap) in digital storage.

Anandtech have done a little review on Gigabyte's i-Ram, and I remain absolutely thrilled.. i-Ra isn't in itself very revolutionary, but more like a sign of things to come.

iRam is at its current version a PCI-card with 4 RAM-slots free to plug in whatever you want of ram. The exacts of this is not important, what is, is that once booted, the storage capacity of the ram will be detected as an unformatted harddrive by the BIOS. It will be free to install exactly what you want, and will for all practical purposes behave exactly like one. Except it's blindingly fast. It's so fast it should max your PCI bus, continuously, and handle multiple multiple requests well due to NO MOVING PARTS, larger than electron-size). And silent.

In short it will be just as RAM is, it just works, and usually finishes it's tasks before you notices it has even started. It will be a lot slower than regular ram, since the PCI bus is the limiting factor, and the units produced this far, have had non-optimized chip layouts.

The main feature, is that the built-in battery, will keep the iRam powered and retain data, even if the unit is unplugged for up to 16 hours (more than enough to be useful). So

The current size/price ratio is horrible, and the maximum capacity is way too small for REAL fun, but consider this; a stationary PC with fanless powersupply, extra large CPU heatsink and fanless graphics card. Add in one iRam with 4 Gb capacity for OS and temporary caching of files for playback, and use a Gigabit NIC to fetch files for playback. What you'll be left with is a mediacenter PC that makes LESS noise than your refrigerator, or even the home stereo at max volume, and nothing playing.

The only way to tell if it's on, is to check the LED's, or observe infrared heat emission. It's sooo sweet I can't even begin to explain all the nuances of GOOD this means. But if this gets some time to become more usable, and the price/capacity ratios come down, and the performance of all 'silent' components are ok, then home mediacentre solutions with solid state clients and media content servers (sooner or later super-broadband providers' serverparks can do this job), will become really popular combo.

Digital nostalgia, where will we be in 100 years?

As I just happen to have enjoyed a little less tech-influenced style of living, I haven't used my old fulltower PC in about a year. As i visited my parents this weekend I stumbled across an 'old' hard drive (it's not that it's antique or anything, it just hadn't been powered on for about a year, and had 111Gb of my stuff inside). I went through some of the contents (120Gb is a LOT of bits). Wham! Instant nostalgia! I hit pictures, music and software that were at least one year, and more often than not, much older than that.. It brought back memories, and made me go through lots of things that happened earler when i used the disk the most, and even 5 year(plus) old music that touched some emotional nerve.

It made me think, that hard drives, and other digital storage media are like the diaries and photo-albums of the digital age. It follows that with this new role (it isn't exactly new.. as all digital activity, have been kind of a memory box for whoever were working with particular types of sotware..).

It also follows that this role is a new, and maybe even more demanding challenge for the computer. "Family Critical Computing" is the new trendy word. This is a tough nut for home computers, since most of the basic relability of this system depends on the harddrive to run error-free.

It is also interesting to think about what might be ariund in 100, or maybe 5 years from now.. *sighs*... good old summer music, what i really need, is for it to "stay forever young".. I'll put my money on regular backup routines and open formats.

For future "Family Critical" purposes, I'll consider using some off-site storage where I can buy space at reasonable rates. For now Gmail will do.

Moore: exponential growth of Goodness!

Moore's law.

It's a concept that I like very much. It gets more and more.. interesting, the more I think about it. It' widely known, but gets much less hype than it really deserves.
Think about this; you might equal the effects of mr Newton's law of gravity with Moore's law.. To push a slightly ambitious analogy, just consider only one difference between these; the medium they affect.. Gravity affects anything that has mass and is a force that accelerates objects with mass toward each other..

The most notable effect of this law is that if you let go of your cup of coffee it will most likely, depending on your location, accelerate toward the gravitational center of the earth.

Moore's law is not a law of nature, it is more a close relationship between the fundamental production process of transistor-based technology, the development of these methods, and economical laws of supply and demand, that have, in a so remarkably linear way, scaled down the size of transistors so they shrink about 50% in size every 18 months. This is not a simple predictable development that can go on forever (and should really be named 'Moore's tendency' to be more correct)

The immediate effect this has is to continuously affect the size, price, and the raw material cost per-transistor in micro-chips. This translates nicely into the daily life so that anything that can be done with a transistor-based chip, WILL be done with a transistror. And every 18 months these chips WILL be smaller, more powerfull and less hungry for electricity and in general better suited for whatever purpose you can put them to. With the increasing computational- , and micromanaging power disponible on a global scale, this will be a force that accellerates the flow of information, and speed up the automation of machines, and virtually every other process that can be controlled or enchanced by microchips.

This could be percieved as 'nothing unusual', given that this development is an everyday phenomenon, just like gravity it's nothing much to get worked up about, it's just there, right? The coffe cup hits the floor, and new line of computers hits the store every season time and time again. Right?

Wrong!

Even though these two phenomenons are very difficult to compare, there is one difference. Both forces can be said to accelerate something, either matter, or 'human technolgical development'. But the most striking difference is that the acceleration caused by gravity is very abruptly ended when the gravitational objects finally impacts into each other, (or, if we're talking the inter-planetary level here, enters an orbit of some kind). But, Moore's law, if it holds true, and microchips continue to develop and increase in efficency, the acceleration of human development, will NOT stop, until the Moore constant is declining. There are many, many arcicles which discuss the future of the Moore constant, the rate of increase or decrease, or (not unlikely) be completely obsoleted, by a new fundamental computational paradigm change. Who knows..

But for the mental excercise, just consider the possibility that Moore's law might predict the future, for as long as the next 100 years (not very likely, but still)..

The effect would undoubtly be that everything you ever imagined, that involved microchips, will be reality, and very quickly, become yesterday's news. Everything chip-controlled will become increasingly small, until the very barriers imposed by fundamental physics rules will protest, and then things will become more and more complex, still pushing the rules of the physical playground. Just imagine something being as small as you can imagine, and then you will probably be in the right neighborhood, but still a tad too big.

When thinking along these lines of miniaturization, a new and exiting development will also take place, moved by the same economy/technology push and pull as the computer advances are governed by: the next obvious step will be to integrate the advances in computational and ultra small technology with the most complex mechanism yet known to humanity, man himself...

Try this. Imagine the Darwinean evolutionary theory of the journey from mokey to man mixed with the consequences of Moore's law..... done thinking?




I wanna be a cyborg.

O' web interface, thy blessings be ever so many, BUT..

[metablog warning!]

While web interfaces are accessible, platform independent and mostly reliant
on open standards, and gererally quite handy to use, one BIG problem is the uncanny ability to eat a big potion of work (think 'homework' and 'The Dog'), and still be hungry for more.. One distraught click, and GONE.

"Nonononoo.. I didn't want that! Escape! Regret! Undo! *click-click-click*"

Some more navigating, reloading and restless flickering back and forth through the website, before the bitter realization that the text is beyond rescue, AND that this probably is caused solely by my own very poorly guided action. With the assistance of a interface without the necessary foolproofing, and a solution lacking a basic undo/rollback feature I have given myself a mental equivalent of a good, healthy punch in the face. Stupid, stupid!

Security features like session timeout, being used to avoid unauthorized access to shared computers, have many, many hours of my creative work on its conscoiusness.

This is a source of intense negative vibes in my case, because of the sheer pointlessness of what has happened before my eyes. Written material, of reasonable quality, just disappear by accident of navigation. Here I, the writer, spend some of the most valuable rescource known to man, fractions of my own lifetime, refining, considering and putting to print my own words.

And then, for no good reason the words are lost. Without even a hint of purpose to their brief existence, there have been no audience, no transfer and mating of memes , no good done, with the possible exception of joy on the authors part, however fleeting, derived from work well done.

The text can wery well be re-created, maybe in a even better way than the initial, but the writers motivation, mood, and all stress-related physiological processes take a serious hit.

Data loss in general, and those caused by web interfaces in general, sucks. The only vaguely positive data loss experience I've ever had, was the rapid, successive, catastrophic loss of content on every hard drive in my posession. Weird enough, it felt therapeutic.

The conclusion of this rant must be, beware of data loss, keep backups and save always!

First posting, all set and.. POSTS AWAY!

Why the silly title? You might wonder what kind of message I'm trying to broadcast, but hey, it's probably more than one.

First of all i really like the sound of it, My Castle. It's all mine. And I can do whatever I want around here. Probably without anybody taking notice, lest I be loud enough, and invite people over, ever so often.

I'm online pretty often. The majority of my friends are online too, and not in the "what's-new-in-the-online-version-of-the-local-paper-today,-maybe-some-porn?"-wussy kind of way. We go online to socialize, to seek knowledge, software(legal and, to a varying degree, not-so-legal), news sources of our own preference, even sexual satisfaction (though few make this a public activity, SOMEONE has to fund the multi-billion industry of online porn, right?). The internet is a MAJOR medium, with a considerable impact on our lives.

Me, for one, myself dabble with the idea of getting disposable income from work and operations, in some way or another, connected to the great big internet. That's a quite thorough adoption of, and a heavy reliance on a technical solution, like the internet is.

This may seem stupid, but what I find most remarkable about this is that EVERYBODY does this. It's nothing special about this for a lot of the people living in the good old civiliced part of the world(no offence to countries with non-functioning TLD's like .er). The growing percentage og people, on a regular, or constant basis, connecting to a global, digital network, is so huge that people did not even bother to imagine the effects of a only 20 years ago.

And and as a firm believer in Moore's Law, I will have to say 'you ain't seen nothing yet!' about this developing trend.

Forget everything about the 68'ers, the dessert, the X and Y generation, it's the online generation that counts.