What happens if one day there isn’t electricity, internet, etc. How do you get your money out?

It all works until the computers go down. Then what do you have?

Now that we have had several years of coming back to a full circle with the main frames behind the glass wall and on a raised floor, wtf do you expect when you have a single point of failure? The cloud is great, but stuff doesn’t work if the internet is down or not accessible.

I don’t understand them either. If there’s a market for something, there will always be customers want to buy it. The virtual vs tangible is where I have a problem with NFT. All it takes is one virus, state hackers or no electricity and virtual assets aren’t worth squat.

With cash I donâ(TM)t have to worry about the electricity going out

âoeOh, and the difference between time-sharing on a mainframe and The Cloud is...?âoe When I teach computer classes I talk about the evolution of computing from the days of the main frame behind the glass window, on the raised floor, that ran your applications and held all of your data. Then PCâ(TM)s were invented to âoeempower the userâ to take charge of their own applications and data, even though in some cases the PC had to be equipped with a card to be able to talk to the main frame to get at the data anyway. Then local area networks came along because some of that data needed to be shared, became too big to fit on a floppy disk and sneaker net, while great exercise became a bottleneck in accessing the data in a timely fashion. Then came the internet and cloud computing because we needed to share the data and applications with the world, which is basically the main frame - now a bunch of blade hardware and virtual machines, behind the glass window, maybe on the raised floor, that ran your applications and held all of your data. If you wait long enough things come full circle.

I have a hotel property that uses Charter for their guest internet access. They routinely get copyright violation notice emails from Charter, but they are pretty powerless as to what to do about it since the email is pretty vague as far as connection details that could possible be traced back to a guest that is long gone. They do have a guest agreement page that states that the guest wonâ(TM)t among other things âdownload copyrighted materialsâ(TM), but of course they do it anyway. If the recording industry was really serious about the problem, they would provide a IP blacklist to the ISPâ(TM)s that they could use for filtering. Even with TOR and VPNâ(TM)s to obscure location, the data requested still has to hit the open internet at some point where the filter would be useful. But, this would actually require them to be proactive instead of pushing their problem onto someone else. This recent whining by the recording industry reminds me of what happened back in the 80â(TM)s when they whined to the government about home tapers and how they were losing so much money because of it. So could you please Mr Senator put a tax on recording media, payable to us, to make up for those lost profits? Btw, hereâ(TM)s a brib âer campaign contribution towards your reelection.

Iâ(TM)ve heard that Visio isnâ(TM)t the only manufacturer that is going to be doing this. I guess spying on me while Iâ(TM)m watching tv isnâ(TM)t enough of a revenue stream, now Iâ(TM)ll be seeing pop up ads.

Considering that I have seen machines in my shop with every brand of antivirus on them, I tell my customers that if antivirus really worked, I wouldnâ(TM)t be in business. If itâ(TM)s a reputable antivirus and available for free, why pay for it? Whatâ(TM)s the real value of pay for antivirus? One day itâ(TM)s $9.95, the next itâ(TM)s $39.99 and the day after itâ(TM)s $79.99. Which tells me that itâ(TM)s value is whatever the market will bear.

I have been doing IT work since 73 and itâ(TM)s definitely getting harder and harder to keep up with all of the changes. We not only have to keep track of the good stuff for our employers or customers, we also have to have our eyes and ears open on the black hat side of things. All the while doing our daily âoechoresâ of renewing the smoke, polishing the mirrors and performing PMâ(TM)s on the solar flare filters. I sometimes wonder if thereâ(TM)s enough time in the day to do it all. Thankfully I will be coming to the end of my career soon, 409 days and a wake up.

Actually itâ(TM)s not a stupid question. Your age group pretty much determines whether you need/want a manual. If youâ(TM)re an older individual, a paper manual is usually wanted. If youâ(TM)re younger, itâ(TM)ll probably never be opened. What would be nice is an electronic version of the manual on the deviceâ(TM)s desktop, that is updated as the OS is updated, instead of having to go search for one on the internet.

1803 must have been released so customers could beta test it, because it sure wasnâ(TM)t ready for general release. I had 8 laptops in my shop that were bricked by 1803. Microsoft's âoefixâ is a clean install. When I asked the tech how Iâ(TM)m supposed to explain to the customer that a Microsoft update broke their computer, but theyâ(TM)re going to have to pay me to fix it. (In 4 cases the customer paid, the other 4 they werenâ(TM)t worth putting that much money into and the customer went to Wally World to buy a new one.) The tech said that theyâ(TM)d fix it for free if the customer had another computer and a flash drive. Uh huh, Iâ(TM)m sure that someone with a heavy accent telling someone who can barely turn on their computer how to fix it over the phone will really work. I truly wish that Linux would move past the propeller head stage and make it easy for regular people to use it and get productive work done. Mint is almost there, but itâ(TM)s still not as easy as Windoze is.