A tall, inelegant and somewhat unattractive woman joined the queue ahead of us by a couple of people – acting as if she was talking to a friend of hers already in the queue. In fact she was queue jumping. Very un-British. Anyway, I bit my lip, as I was in a good mood, and coping well with busy shops and lots of people.

The woman was finally called to the checkout, and finished paying for her goods as we were called to the adjacent till. Instead of moving away, she started to apply lipstick.

I couldn’t help myself, I turned to my wife and said, quite loudly, ” You know, you can put lipstick on a pig, but its still a pig”. My wife, knowing exactly what I was talking about, went bright red and into a fit of quiet giggles. The woman glared at me and walked off. I felt good. We paid for our items and left the shop, at which point, my wife, who was nearly purple in the face by now, burst out laughing in the street.

Thank you KMandla, you made our Christmas

However, none of these things use flash or other client-side scripting languages. And since I’m studying professional IT, I can say that every course promotes server-side scripting instead of client-side scripting. Except javascript but only for breadcrumps to make site navigation easier.

Btw, HTML/CSS/Javascript = Uber-Combo!

If you want the latest in flash with all it’s inherent security flaws then I say good, go for it! Alternatively, if you want to use Lynx to browse the web and just have a text only web then fine again – I do both.

Having been on the net since 94 I have seen just about everything and nothing I see today is innovative, it’s all a rehash of yesterdays idea’s like IRC >> Forums >> Facebook. We’ve always had social networking, it’s nothing new that came with the net since day one. The difference is really the audience and I hate to say it but it’s a dumb audience in general willing to divulge their toilet habits or worse on Twitter etc… Let’s here that phrase again, “Lipstick on a pig”

Oh, and just because some of us like older computers doesn’t make us an e-luddite, it’s just a bit of fun basically and fun is what’s sadly lacking in the world today.

Sometimes, I really do think we need a sarcasm symbol on our keyboards. (Personally I think that symbol already exists as the windows key, but that’s not the point.)

The only point I disagree with you guys on is the gamers jab. Games have become a heck of a lot more socially inclined in the last ten years. Online Game-space is swiftly becoming it’s own communications platform. (If you don’t see it, look at the organization of a WoW raid on youtube.) This sort of argument was used against chess when it came out, too. That it was an indoor activity that simply wasted time with no benefit to society. Victorians tried to ban the game in England at one point.

Does the average joe-shmoe non-gamer-non-animator-non-cad type person need the latest and shiny-ist? Nope. Not even close. But then again people are starting to recognize that. One word: Netbook. They maybe running on recently fabricated processors out of Intel or AMD, but they are a definite step back in computing power compared to even the last generation chips. The only things they retained out of chip advancement was the size decrease. Adding to the netbook backstep, the rise of the iPad is another good example. That thing did away with parallel processing! That has been a part of modern computing for what… 20+? Granted some of this is the novelty factor, and some of it is thrift. (That’s in the case of netbooks rather than the iPaid …err… iPad.)

Unfortunately, the computers were not really built to last. It is a fairly rare computer that lasts to make it into K.’s hands. Parts of them might, but most computers really do turn into junk. The tough, long-lifetime computer revolution has yet to happen, though it likely will before too long. When that happens we will put a lot of professional Chinese kids out of jobs.

In my opinion, the future of the web will be (or should be) the Semantic Web. More structured data that we can use from within other applications besides a full browser using 48 cores to render a webpage.
This, by being more machine readable, will be usable by any app including CLI ones, without the need to render the HTML and CSS and click on stuff.

More automation, more possibilities, less time wasting waiting for stuff to load or copy-pasting and manually aggregating content.

But we all need to contribute by adjusting our own websites. People using CMS based websites (like this blog), it’ll be easier: just install one of the available plugins[1] – no need to do anything else. For custom software it’ll be harder, but the advantages are good enough, I hope.

[1] http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tags/semantic-web

I am sorry to disappoint you, but K. can buffer 100+ youtube videos on a box like yours, and I dare you – watch at least 9 of them at the same time using mplayer, I know because I did it. Having my windows trasnaprent and having 3d accelerated gaussian blur on their ‘transparent’ parts is not really any productivity bust. Nor is the ability to buffer several YT videos. A productivity bust would be for you to sit on your butt and do some work instead of talking things you know nothing about. Like how computer advancements are developing our world.

This said, I know professionals that need extreamly powerful machines to do their work, like CAD/CAM and stuff. For them the fact it can be done on a computer alone is a productivity bust as once they were doing it on paper sheets, 10sq feet at once sometimes. So yeah, for them advancement is good. But for people who slack all day, write emails and watch youtube it is not. Nor is for gamers, wasting their time in physical inactivity and destroying the little social skills they might once have.

It’s people like you that would have the printing industry go back to black and white. I bet you’re one of these soppy sentimentalists that loves his black and white films as well? Well I damn right refuse to watch Casablanca in anything but full colour and hate the flick anyway — no CGI, what a load of old rubbish — just like the unprofessional useless junk you’re using here.

Sorry, can’t hear you. I’m just enjoying the 6 months life expectancy I have left on this laptop as I’m buffering 12 YouTube videos at once. Envious? I bet you are — you don’t have Flash installed mainly because your junk can’t handle it! Roll on Web 4.0! I’ll be in the front seat, and loving it.