My sense is, if you said no, then you’re probably an ideologue unable to make course corrections to find middle ground on what matters to 80% of these United States; harmony over hostility.

I was Republican all my life and then I retired from the military. I was apolitical until my adult children began pursuing higher education and then I used the GI Bill to get myself involved and the Democrats valued veterans more than the Republicans as evidenced by the total state of disrepair of this Nation’s health care system, a small part of which is the pathetic VA budget.

I submit, any centrist party member could switch roles with their “antagonist” counterpart in the “opposite” party and flourish because Centrists in any field known by any other name would be interchangeable!

It would seem the elitists of both parties are proffering a reverie no one has ever experienced, not even in their dreams, so my advice for the World would be follow my dream; Make Love Not War.

The Huffington Post  |  By Alexis Kleinman Posted: 03/13/2013 7:24 pm EDT  |  Updated: 03/14/2013 1:52 pm EDT

The most salient point in the article and clearly the author is proffering this bizarre notion that Apple cannot compete in a market they themselves created.

Wave after wave of factories will go out around the Orient, like incandescent bulbs. * Poof *

Thursday, February 21, 2013 – 2:08 pm

Textiles for luxurious garments are next.

Apple will patent multitouch fabrics embedded with flex-circuitry interfacing with bluetooth and wifi offering the user a total ethereal connection to the resources of the Internet. This connection can be scripted myriad ways to the delight of the user.

Unfortunately, the manufacturing process will require cost-prohibitive retrofitting and so we will begin to see a rise in new manufacturing here in America ignited by Apple’s treasure trove of intellectual property that will translate into textiles.

Pricey coats and hats and gloves will make up the bulk of the market for a product that is still to thick to wear casually, but will begin to appear for a market who goes for such novelties, but until Apple can weave silicon as thin as silk, manufacturing will be confined to high-security compounds on foreign soil, to secure the process from corporate espionage.

When the fabric is as thin as pantyhose and can be layered for effect, Apple will open manufacturing here in America to preserve the process and finally Americans will be producing specialty textiles in myriad fabrics, styles, and colors.

In the same manner the cotton ginning meme lead to the mass production of textiles to kickstart the industrial revolution, Apple Apparel, Inc will impact our GDP by an order of magnitude when manufacturing is in full bloom for embedding circuitry into our ties and tees.

Tugging a tie will shuffle your music, tugging your collar will condition the environment under your clothes; cooler/warmer, breathable/sealed, your clothes will not only make you comfortable inside and out, but will actually make you smarter, giving you an edge over those who cannot afford such apparel.

Your clothing is listening to you speak and as you talk a computer is poised to provide you with the word on the tip of your tongue; you’ll tug silently at your cuff and the word will be whispered into your ear!

When our clothes start whispering in our ears we’ll wonder whose voice it is we’re listening to as it is instructing us to take a leap of faith. Mmm…

In any case, the iWatch is just a precursor to wearable computers; our street clothes will envelop us in a shower of knowledge, cascading down from satellites and the population of Wikibots (people dispensing useless information like me) will become the world’s largest living organism of unoriginal people on the planet.

Computing will transcend man when he no longer controls the on/off switch so I hope they build a kill-switch into my jockeys before I exceed my better judgement!

Cheers!

Read more at http://macdailynews.com/2013/02/21/abi-research-apple-iwatch-could-prove-to-be-revelation-in-wearable-tech/#l8BXhkkTpImApY3e.99

I am unbelieveably happy for the first time in a long time.

For timealone visitors, welcome. I am preparing to unveil a new Time Alone site and hope to have it ready to go by April 2024. So sit back and relax and let my new site blow you down like a runaway freight train!

J/k

Seamless. Simple. Satisfying.

so I reinvented life,

now I am alright.

Haiku for Kathleen

I read it took a user 5 steps to figure out how to print using Windows 8 on a desktop computer. Four steps were guesses, only to find it was ctrl-p, after all.

I see it all the time in iOS apps too, especially in apps from those who’s first introduction to the computer interface was MS-DOS; which used a command-line interface to launch programs, and required a modicum of knowledge of Microsoft’s home-brewed command structure and file naming conventions. I went through it too, with the Apple ][, but the difference was, once I got passed the DOS prompt, everything was better!

Compared to WordPerfect's clean but inelegant interface, WordScribe for the ][e "looked" like you were typing on paper and WYSIWYG was born. Fonts were being rendered by the graphics chips in the 68k Motorola technology that powered my Apple ][. I was self-publishing in 1983 and in 1987, when I finally switched to the Mac for good, the transition was absolutely painless and what was really sweet is that, some of my later Apple ][ software could run in emulation on my Mac.

The Apple ][e routines were embedded in the Read-Only-Memory (ROM) chips of the Macintosh and because they couldn't be non-destructively reverse-engineered, that was considered hardware "DRM" in those days, giving Macintosh a distinct advantage over Compaqs chosen way to share IBMs intellectual property with the world by giving it the IBM-Compatible Standard, subjecting the world to Microsoft's brand of computer interaction.

Microsoft’s interface for the computer has become so utterly complex it might be rejected outright by the market, like Windows Me and Vista was, if this latest interface isn’t solid gold compared to Windows 7.

Never mind about how incredibly polished OS X has become, Microsoft is once again competing with itself, which is what they do over there in Redmond; they are always competing with their next product, and why not? they’re not hardware guys, they’re software guys and therein lies a subtle difference in the genius of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates; Jobs had the courage to put all his skin in the game by making both the computer and the software to run it. Gates couldn’t see beyond the Command-line interface because he was fascinated by OPNSEZME.bat and the creative ways you could make directories restricted to the use of 8 ascii characters.

Imagine if Bill Gates had collaborated with IBM instead of competing with them and delivered the world’s first desktop computer? We might have been lightyears ahead of where we are today, who knows! I know that the IBM PS2-Series was about as Mac-like as anything, with Plug & Play too. If only Bill Gates hadn’t been so shortsighted, because I believe IBM would have had the best scientists working to meld Gates’s OS with IBMs penchant for clean design and with money to burn, could have prevented the granulation of the PC platform and the Market’s unwavering desire to disclose the promise of bigger, better, faster next year as a marketing gimmick to unload last year’s crap.

So it will be Steve Jobs, IMHO, who will be forever remembered as the man who changed the way we interact with computers. Aesthetics and slick marketing aside, he did more to change the way we harness the power of machines by providing unique but logical ways to make our computer work as an extension of our office reality; like wadding up paper and dropping it into the waste basket at the corner of our desk. The right-hand corner for Righties, naturally.

Xerox’s skunkworks gave birth to the Desktop metaphor and the Mouse but the magic of it all was that we the people were empowered by Steve Jobs to move the Trash can where ever we wanted it back in 1984! More than that though, he did the same for photos, music, and video. Apple’s interfaces are extremely popular because they work. It’s that simple.

Also, I believe Mac users learn early on about the importance of proper file management because from the very beginning Apple users were introduced to the concept of Folders and the “sheets” of paper that went in them, and quickly noted they would always be where they left them last.

Windows users on the other hand, were being left to their own devices. It got so out of control that, American business took on the ever-expanding cost center in Information Technology, so that every CEO could reinvent what Apple Computer, Inc was already famous for, easy access to your own data centers. IT has become the elephant in the room for Microsoft and sits around the board rooms of America chewing through resources like Kirsty Alley through a box of Ho-Ho’s!

But let’s be clear, all this talk about pairing down IT infrastructure in the coming years could be put on hold indefinitely if Microsoft continues to falter and Ballmer gets thrown out. There will be a chaotic restructuring in not just Microsoft, but in every company who has employees bearing greater allegiance to Microsoft than the very company they work for.

In IT we have an interface between Bill Gates and the rest of the world. They are the priests who read the scriptures, drink kool-aid, and share their visions with their employer.

For Windows, Bill Gates was the public icon of computerdom but became the joke of late night comedy and a source of inspiration in Nineties for what not to do with computer interfaces, ribbons, menus, and legacy ports.

Unlike Gates, Steve Jobs was a muse for engineers like Wozniak and Serlet. He himself was an interface between artists and nerds and together they created not only the first commercially successful computer but, unlocked the ability to make the computer your bitch.

Steve Jobs was a wizard at subsuming complex command structures and wrapping them up with a bow. He absolutely flourished after leaving Apple and joining up with Avi Tevanian, the Unix genius who transformed Apple into the juggernaut it is today with NeXTStep.

Take a twenty-five-year proven product like Unix and apply the Human Interface Guidelines with a just a skosh of eye-candy and I give you the Tree of Knowledge.

I remember how long it took for the Drag & Drop meme to finally become second-nature for Windows users. Bill Gates just couldn’t grasp the desktop metaphor; what can I say, he’s a product of the command-line interface, and unlike Scott Jenson, who pioneered Mac OS System 7, building the Mac’s interface from the machine-level up, but he also worked on the Newton team to extend the desktop to the mobile space.

Programming the GUI from the outset, using a machine-level language gave Apple a distinct advantage that would pay off handsomely years later. It wasn’t until Gates finally brought in Ray Ozzie and many other smart “interface” people to at least establish universal guidelines for the Windows community.

Microsoft wrapped MS-DOS in a Shell ( like Wine,VMs et. al., for Macintosh) as a transitional measure while they struggled to reverse-engineer all the machine-level calls from the System in Mac OS.

MS-DOS authors/programmers struggled with the desktop metaphor causing ripples of confusion in the market that is apparently still a WIP.  The reality of it was, Microsoft was forced to get something out there “just as good” and quickly. Microsoft set the standard for the PC interface guidelines and IMO, their biggest challenge has been to get out of their own way.

Apple, on the other hand, has a university devoted to this topic and myriad ways humans and machines interact. The touch interface is still in its infancy and there is the hope that Microsoft at least built a strong foundation on which their very existence depends if this latest version of human-interface design blows up in Steve Ballmer’s face.

nyuk, nyuk, nyuk.

One topical area of interest will be in manufacturing. I can see a return to the early days of America’s industrial revolution where workers lived and worked and their children were schooled on the manufacturing premises in dorm-like buildings if single, and subsidized housing if married.

Perhaps Apple can kick-start a manufacturing revolution, starting in California, putting tens-of-thousands to work. If Apple were to subsidize cost-of-living expenses (allowances) then wages could be dramatically reduced.

For a billion-dollars to start, Apple could buy up residential properties of modestly-built housing, or blow-in-place and rebuild housing for its employees. Campus living for singles is certainly doable.

Let’s kick it around and see what we could come up with… assuming Apple was going to bring manufacturing back to the US of A, what would it take to make the move more palatable?

What about content? Is the iTunes Store going to be the only source of content, besides the usual suspects like YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, et. al.?

If the internet is the conduit used for transmission, then good luck trying to sell many Apple-branded televisions. There isn’t enough bandwidth from your ISP to wirelessly stream everyone’s standard def video much less high def, not without a whole lot of cooperation from your ISP.

Speaking of which, why would the cable company, who also offers broadband internet, want to work with Apple and their internet television? Clearly, cable companies have a distinct advantage because they are wired directly into your home. Same with Dish and DirecTV, they don’t suffer bandwidth issues.

So big deal, Apple comes to market with a television that is awesome looking, complete with a DVR, beautiful menus and themes, 10x picture-in-picture, wallpaper, ad nauseum, what about content?

I figure this television will stumble, much the same way as Apple TV, because quite frankly, the first iteration was screaming to be hacked just to make it more useful.

I installed a Broadcom Chrystal HD chip in mine, displacing the Airport card, to get 1080p. But more than that, I hacked it in order to have access to hundreds of obscure television channels normally available only on cable television, but have found a home in hundreds of repositories around the Net. Most of these “stations” are broadcasting crappy quality signal anyway.

No matter how you slice it though, you have to have broadband access and it would seem Apple is going to have a hard row to hoe, getting everyone to accept all of their content over wireless.

Apple why don’t you just launch a fricking satellite or two, or four and take the walled garden concept into the 21st Century? Sell a dish with every television.

Anyway, I don’t get it. I don’t want an iTunes Store TV set that only works over wirelessAs an Apple shareholder, I don’t want to see an Apple-branded television that comes with a tuner and cable connections that is supposed to compete with the existing high-end manufacturers on the strength of a fricking GUI and a one-button remote.

For his soul has found a home.

Long live Steve’s Spirit.