Mokka mit Schlag » Tech

Woody Leonhard notes that:

with Windows Vista and potentially Office 2007 that changes – the activation system will occasionally check if the product key is still ‘legal’. If Microsoft decides that the product key for your software has been stolen and misused then your copy of Vista or possibly Office 2007 can be disabled remotely (after a warning period).

He’s worried about piracy. I.e. what happens if somebody else “borrows” your key, so Microsoft cuts you off through no fault of your own. I’m wondering what happens when the U.S. Government leans on Microsoft to cut off the keys to the latest alleged seeker of Weapons of Mass Destruction.
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While reviewing an upcoming article of mine, a friend mentioned that some of his students are having trouble creating root directories in Windows; for example a directory such as C:\project. This certainly isn’t the case on any Windows system I own, but they’re all running Windows 2000.

Has anyone heard of anything like this? Do recent versions of XP or Vista require that all user created files be placed in C:\Documents and Settings\Username or some such? Can anyone confirm or deny this? Maybe it depends on whether or not you’re running as Administrator?

Today I reached a milestone I haven’t seen in years: an empty inbox. Well actually, not quite, but close enough. There are now exactly 423 messages in my inbox and each one of them has one of four labels:

Action

Something needs to be done about this message

News

A tidbit I’ll eventually post one of my web sites

Waiting

Something I’ll need in the near future, but not until I get a response from someone else

Read and Review

Something interesting to look over when I have a minute, but not urgent. Mostly weekly updates from sites like IBM developerWorks and JavaWorld.

Along with Thunderbird’s built-in “Unread” label and sorting by date, these allow me to quickly and easily see what I need to deal with at any given time. Only the relatively small number of “Action” messages actually require me to do something. News, Waiting, and Read and Review can all be managed as time or interest permits. This also means I shouldn’t lose track of messages I need to reply to or act on for months, as I sometimes have in the past.

Several thousand other messages have been archived into various folders. This is all part of my ongoing efforts to implement David Allen’s Getting Things Done program.
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If only we could remove the cable connecting our monitor to a computer, then we’d really be in a wireless world. The necessary bandwidth and speed hasn’t been there to support this yet, but some people are trying. TeqGear has released the Wid 101. It’s a big chunky box, it costs $995, and its maximum resolution is 1366 by 768 pixels, below what I’ve been using on my monitors for half a decade or more. However, it’s the first product of its type I’ve seen. Wait a couple of years and maybe we’ll finally be ready to break the wired chains that bind us.

What Kelley L. Ross and Captain Ed have is a failure of the imagination when examining the economics of Star Trek:

Politically and economically, it operates outside of the realm of science fiction and into fantasy. Nothing in its universe explains how human society manages to build the massive ships that comprise Star Fleet, nor the brilliant technology that enables them. Who builds these things — and how and why? It’s all well and good to say that money no longer exists, but people have to be compensated in some manner — otherwise, the Star Trek society is based on benevolent slavery. The reference to “Imagine” is particularly appropriate; this view of human nature seems particularly flaccid, where all creative impulses have been subordinated and all enterprise has been discouraged, pun particularly intended.

Nonetheless, I think a little thought about the implications of the technologies that exist in the Star Trek universe indicates that the economy doesn’t have to be anything like the fascist state Ross envisions. In fact, it seems likely to be far superior to our own.
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Lately I’ve noticed an increasing number of companies recording my conversation “for quality assurance.” In some cases like calls to my broker this is reasonable, but turnabout’s fair play; and perhaps a really good idea in the face of company’s like Verizon that refuse to honor their agreements without a court order. So here are my questions:
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