Technology’s impact

Even the IEEE Spectrum had an article referring to the zombies with their little mobile devices. “Doing what?” is always my question, especially when I, as a pedestrian, almost get run over by one who is behind the wheel. We see these folks everywhere; they are an increasing danger.

But, technology as a whole has always been a problem. NASA, famously, always picked the older technology. We can really discuss that.

So, I have been at this since 2009 and have accumulated a whole lot of stuff. Some of it has been transcribed to articles (see What’s New 03/19/2017 for reprints). A lot has been used for applications for various persons and several organizations. A lot is pending further analysis.

One thing is that some framework has to be chosen. Everyone has gone to the cloud. That is not smart for many reasons. You do see some re-thinking this and defining personal clouds. I want the TGS to have its own server. We have to discuss all of this.

But, the Windows 10 deal, of late, has helped hone focus on some of the issues. I picked it in order to get up to speed on the current, but, in my research, I noticed that many people who “compute” (as in, real stuff) are still at Windows 7. Well, I see that as a proper way to go for many reasons, though I will limp along with Windows 10 (MS is now releasing something that is a scaled down Windows 10 with more web friendliness – as if that is what real work needs).

You see, an update occurred. So, the wifi goes. I got that restarted. Mind you, that type of thing took away from my getting done what I had planned. Then, the printer wouldn’t work. Here, Windows 10 sees the thing as a scanner only. So, it will read a page, but it will not print. Drivers are not available. Not yet. Well, fortunately, I have an older laptop that I’m using until I decide on a printer.

One bit of the deal is that things have to be addressable. Oh Lord, IoE will kill us if AI doesn’t ;-).

Now, as the Windows 10 post mentions, I spent a little time getting familiar and configuring the system. Then, I slowly started to go through files and get things up to date. That forced me to come up with encryption strategies (in the works as well as forcing a rethink of processes, such as backup). All of this, side issues.

So, I’m rolling along. Too, I became quite enamored of the breadth and depth of what I had gathered. Too, I was impressed by how much I could do normally. Yet, we do power-using at the beck and call of the system. Lose the trace, and one has to rebuild, essentially, the process.

This will be a huge problem for robots; deep learning is a panacea (silver bullet).

BTW, the transition from Windows Vista to Windows 7 was a piece of cake. With Windows 10, they want too much control; so far, I have been able to circumvent that. I am not sure that letting them have control would make it better; in my mind, I would worry even if things seemed to work.

Ah, if only we could go back 15 years and do this over, folks.

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