Felger Sounds Off on Internet Insanity

You are suffering from a classic case of future envy.Remember 2400 baud modem connections to bulletin boards? Serial port dongles? DOS function calls from Windows? Memory managers (ah, QEMM, we knew ye well)?They sucked, too.Tomorrow's tech will be better. And we'll all be slim. And have hair.But you're right. Consumer tech has never measured up to state of the art tech, and they don't really even try to get close.On the one hand, capitalism spurs innovation; on the other, it encourages the marketing of crap. It seems they won't put anything better in the grinder as long as we buy the sausage du jour. So the stage is set for someone to introduce something dramatically smarter.Maybe we just need another couple of clever guys in a garage, though Theodoric is right: the Windows platform is maturing in surprising ways. I can't remember the last time I saw a blue window of death. Edited by Omnivorous, : I and i

I have no tech in this fight.I get my interlubes connection via wi-fi laptop from a nice old lady across the street who knows about it--we're both disabled, and I change her lighbulbs.Only one of my house's windows passes wi-fi under my steel roof--with a router that lets me splice in a 10-year-old, 2T XP desktop I use for a media and print server, preserving my CDs, making MP3s for my old iPhone, etc.I have a 48" inch, high refresh rate Chinese HDTV (@$400 Amazon Cyber Monday 2 yrs. ago!) hooked up by VGA cable and microstereo jack. I don't do cable; I have excellent digital broadcast and FM antennas. Yes, I have to hook-up my cameras by wire. After bitter corporate experience, I've come to prefer trailing edge technology to bleeding edge technology.I know it isn't Bill Gates' mansion. But it ain't AOL, either.One of the most intriguing people I ever met on the web was a disabled lady in California who depended on library computers. She was unhappy there, and I sent her $ to take the bus to North Carolina, where she had friends. She remains happy, ten years later.Truly, this is a time of miracles and wonders. Maybe the human interleaving is more important than the seamlessness of the interface.Edited by Omnivorous, : No reason given.