Farhad Manjoo declares it dead:

On paper, the entry-level $999 Air looks subpar. Its processor isn’t nearly as fast as that of a full-size machine, and its screen is too vertically scrunched. The biggest problem, though, seems to be its limited disk space—there’s only 64GB of room for all your files, less than any other computer Apple offers. (The Air uses solid-state flash storage, which is faster and smaller than a traditional mechanical hard drive. It’s also more expensive—for an obscene $200 more, Apple will give you a 128-gigabyte solid state drive.)

But these limitations don’t bother me very much. I was looking for a laptop as a secondary machine, not for getting a lot of daily work done. The Air’s portability and five-hour battery life were more important to me than its screen and speed (which are quite good for most tasks, I’ve found, and certainly better than most netbooks I’ve used). The fact that I can get that portability in a machine with a full-sized trackpad and keyboard—indeed, this is one of the most comfortable keyboards available on a laptop of any size—was a bonus. Still, there was the issue of disk space. How would I make do with a computer that offered less room than some iPods?

When I read the title, and the first paragraph about how this was about an Apple, I figured “Oh, yes. Another example of how if Apple doesn’t offer it you’re better off without it.” But actually, I agree up to a point. SSDs are not really worth the price for the kinds of computers I buy, but if you have a computer with weaker processing power (which may be necessary for something as thin as a Macbook Air) then maybe it is. The Macbook Air doesn’t appeal to me for the same reason that netbooks don’t, but I recognize that both appeal to people who are not me.

Anyway, what I agree with is that by and large having 64GB isn’t that much of an issue. Manjoo goes on to say that we’re going to transition to external drives and the like. A lot of us will. I already do with my pocket drive that I have for the convenience of switching amongst my laptops whether I am home or away. What Manjoo doesn’t really address, though, is that 64GB is enough for most people even without an external drive. It’s a common fault among tech writers to assume that most users are a lot more like them than they are. Which is what Manjoo does.

You would have to spend in the order of $10,000 in order to fill up one of those hard drives with music. Or illegally download 10,000 tracks. Or buy that many tracks off a cheaper service like eMusic (if they’re still cheaper like they used to be). That is not something that most people do. Nor do most people download videos, which is what really takes up the space. If you’re not a music afficionado, which most people aren’t, a hard-core pirate, which most people aren’t, or downloading videos, which most people don’t, there is no reason that you can’t fit everything on to that drive.

Apple, to its credit, understands this. And this corner that they cut is a good one. With hard drive capacities far outstripping need, sideways upgrades make a great deal of sense. Trading processing power for better drives make sense. Not because everyone is going to go out and get a pocket drive, but because most people will never need to. Particularly if the Macbook Air is not their only computer, which it frequently isn’t going to be. They can easily do what I do (with or without the pocket drive) and keep everything on their desktop and move things to their laptop/netbook as required.

Along these lines, I think that Manjoo is right that we’re going to be moving away from singular laptops into something more specialized. Perhaps I am falling into the same trap (thinking everybody will do/want what I do), but with more specialization than ever in computing, it makes sense to have a netbook for light-but-extremely-mobile usage, a desktop for more serious computing, and maybe a laptop for serious computing on the run. And of course a smartphone for extremely-light-and-ridiculously-mobile-but-hard-to-use usage. And an iPad fitting in there somewhere.

Since I was in college there has always been talk about how computers are going to become dumb terminals. Any day now. It still hasn’t happened, but over ten years later I’m finally starting to see it do so. In a fashion. Due largely to the specialization where you have an iPad for some things, a netbook for others, and so on. From experience, it’s going to get harder and harder to keep everything on each computer and easier and easier to use centralized services like GoogleDocs and the like. Particularly when/if you can count on a constant connection to the Internet. That’s the biggest hold-up for me with regard to GoogleDocs. When I have a constant 3G connection with which I do not have to worry about bite usage, it’s going to become a really attractive option. Or at least a good offline editor with good synchronization. Right now a lot of this is under the assumption that you will always have a connection when you need one, but we’re not there yet.

An old acquaintance, Byron, sent me and nine other individuals a message on Facebook. Why me? I don’t know. Since friending one another this is the first real communication we’ve had. We were never really close. I mostly added him because he has an outstanding wit and I enjoyed reading his blog back when he had one. This tidbit will matter later: the guy owns a bar.

Anyway, the message was basically asking me to “like” some quiz or something. It was for a friend of his. Now, ordinarily, I approach this sort of thing like a chain letter and ignore it. Giving in to one request like this usually results in more requests in the future. But Byron simply isn’t the sort of guy to do this sort thing. So if he is doing it, this friend of his must be pretty important to him.

So I did it. In addition to requestion that I “like” this particular thing, he requested a message saying that I/we complied. Not wanting everyone else to be in on the message, I sent a separate one letting him know. Unfortunately, not everyone else took this extra step. So my inbox has been deluged with back-and-forth “Did it!”/”Stop by the bar sometime, next drink is on me!”/”Awesome! Do you know if Jack is gonna make it?”/”Jack is in the hospital.”/”No spit? What happened?!”

I don’t know Jack. This was one thread of which there were five in all and most of them spanned several catching-up messages. As near as I can tell, at least a couple of folks didn’t know that he got a divorce as they were asking after his ex-wife. He apparently chose mostly people like me that he hadn’t talked to in a while.

Every time I get a Facebook message I get a text message to my phone. So it’s really been quite annoying.

On the upshot, I may be able to parlay the message thread about Jack into a free beer of my own if I stop by Byron’s bar. I’m not sure if that’s worth the non-stop beep-beep-beep message notifications on my phone, though.

Windows 8 should be coming out in a couple of years, bringing to light the question of whether its release will be all that relevant. In one sense it will be relevant because the Windows OS is the current standard and that’s unlikely to change. But will the upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 8 be a relevant one?

But here’s the thing: I’m sure that Windows 8 will be an improvement over Windows 7 but can’t imagine who’s going to rush out to buy it. We’re long past the days when a new Windows meant a massive change in the user experience. Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 was a sea change. Since then, however, it’s been pretty ho hum. Windows 98 was mostly a tweak. Windows XP was a pretty noticeable improvement, although most of us just waited until we bought a new box to get it. Vista was widely panned. Windows 7 was what Vista should have been.

Joyner passes right over Windows 2000, which I would also mark as a sea change. Yeah, the interface wasn’t all that different, but the changes on the backend were enormous as they switched to the NT-based platform. This caused problems with compatibility, but also produced the first really stable Windows. The Blue Screen of Death became, if not a thing of the past, more “What the hell” rather than “not again. XP was a mild upgrade, but only became really worth it when hardware caught up to the point that it wasn’t taking a hit on resources. Vista was relevant only to the extent that it was Microsoft’s first widespread disaster (Windows ME was a disaster, but not a widespread one).

The Windows 2000 oversight aside, I think that Joyner is essentially correct. Windows 8 will matter only insofar as it will be installed on new computers from that point forward. That makes it worth keeping an eye on, but not much more than that since Vista has demonstrated that if it’s really bad then Microsoft can be forced to go back to the drawing board. Ultimately, though, Windows is where it needs to be. It’s perhaps not as good as it should be, but it’s good enough. So I agree with those questioning whether they should be taking so long to try to knock our socks off. Windows doesn’t really do “wow” anymore and I am of the mind that they should shift gears towards a more evolutionary rather than revolutionary track.

Despite its many flaws, Windows Vista did some things quite right. The thing is, all of the things that I really like about Vista are either superficial or really small tweaks. For example, I likt e the fact that I can click on a directory at the top of an explorer window and it will backtrack to that directory. I like that if I place a shortcut to a folder that it shows the folder structure on the left side of the window. I like that if I have extensions showing and click to rename a file that it doesn’t highlight the extension. I like the increased control in copying/moving files. These are all really small things that I really miss whenever I go back to XP.

I would much prefer it if this was the kind of thing that Microsoft focused on with future OSes. Annual releases of mostly tweaks with an attractively-priced upgrade package would probably have me upgrading every year. It would have me looking forward to what they’re doing next. It would make each change to the OS more apparent. There are so many differences between Vista and XP that a lot of them end up going unnoticed. And often, rather than being a benefit, they’re a pain because you have to learn all of these changes at once. There’s also the hefty price tag, both in terms of cost and hardware requirements.

Of course, sometimes you have to make sweeping changes. For instance, one big change that Vista/Win7 do that needed to be done is to allow for greater RAM capacity. The transition from 32-bit to 64-bit was also necessary. So I do recognize that you do need revolutionary changes every now and again even if they mean that people are going to have to spend more on hardware and deal with compatibility issues. I don’t know what big changes Win8 will require, though I am open to being convinced. In the meantime, though, I think that they should be working on relatively small upgrades and do like they did with Windows 98 Second Edition. If nothing else, it will give them a good feel for which changes are positively received and which ones are not so that Microsoft doesn’t spend too much time developing something that proves initially to be very unpopular.

In a tangent on my post about lateral upgrades, Rob mentioned that it took Apple to realize that people might want laptops in some color other than black or gray. David commented that there are people that will never get a ThinkPad (The Trumwill Choice) because of their unattractive exterior.

I want to push back, but I really can’t. Not to denigrate the virtues of their OSes or the non-superficial aspects of the products themselves (they have their merits), but Apple has pretty clearly demonstrated that they are correct. But I want to push back due to both aesthetics and the unimportance of aesthetics. On the aesthetic end of things, I actually like the way that the ThinkPads look. I like it to be boxy and unshowy (and unreflective!). Aesthetically, my favorite smartphone far-and-away is the Droid, which gets knocks on its appearance. My current smartphone is smoother around the edges and I guess looks “better”, but if I were choosing based on looks alone instead of the things that Windows Mobile can do that Android can’t, I would go with the Droid.

But mostly I want to object because I don’t understand why it should really matter what the exterior form is so long as it is unobtrusive. And so I look at these devices that intentionally try to look interesting and neat and good and just roll my eyes. I noticed this most recently when I was putting together my newest computer. It used to be that computer cases came in beige and that was pretty much it. At some point there was a transition to black, which I mildly prefer aesthetically but don’t really care. My only real complaint about that transition is that it made my old CD/DVD drives more conspicuous because they were beige while the rest of the computer black. Then silver came along, which is fine though I still wish they would just stick with one color because now there are three colors that I have to coordinate. Not to make my computer look good, exactly, but to make it look, well, inconspicuous, which to me is all that should really matter.

I miss the good old days when a computer case was meant to house a computer. There were no pointless LED lights and colors on it to make it “look better” and crap like that. The computer is not the centerpiece of my computer room. It’s something that does computing.

I suppose I am not entirely immune. The last time around I went ahead and got a black case rather than have a patchwork beige-silver-black computer. But it wasn’t a choice I should have had to make, dag-nabbit. If everything was just beige, I could simply get the case that works.

On the other hand, if my laptops came in different colors, I suppose I wouldn’t have to use electrical tape in order to be able to tell them apart…

A little while back, Nanani took me to task on how on one hand I poked fun at old ads talking about wizbang technology and then right after comment about how our technology today is so wizbang that there’s nowhere to go from here. I was actually making a comment about the technology from five years ago, but in actuality I think we are reaching the point with some technologies that we’re really beyond the point that the vast majority of the computing public is going to need to advance. Not indefinitely, of course, as technological progress always marches on. But I think that the march is going to start really moving in a direction other than bigger-faster-better. And the advances in the PC world are going to be sideways things that are only “better” insofar as they are more convenient and/or easier to use.

In fact, I think we’ve already past that point. I’ve alluded to it several times but I’m not sure if I’ve addressed it head-on. The most recent desktop CPU I’ve bought has processors running at 3GHz, roughly (I’m too lazy to look it up). That is actually the slowest (or maybe second slowest) speed of my last four processors. Of course, there’s a pretty crucial difference. The new computer is a dual-core and the others are not. That means that the new computer has two processors working together. But you can’t add that up and say “so it’s like 6GHz” because it doesn’t actually work that way. Rather, the enhancement comes from the fact that it can more easily do more things at once. This is especially convenient for a guy like me that has numerous windows open (19 at the moment), but it’s not quite the same as “faster”. Better, but not faster. Cooler, but not necessarily necessary for the average user.

A better example is netbooks, which run slower on single-core processors. Not just single-core CPUs, but ones actually slower than the Pentiums that were available years ago. But netbooks have their own appeal in the form of portability and better battery life and price. This, to a lot of people, is more important than bigger-faster-better the same way that having two 3GHz processors is better than one 6GHz processors. These things are only true because processors have gotten faster than we need them to be.

The same goes to hard drives. Most people need a pretty limited amount of hard drive space. Entry-level HDs on bargain computers actually contain enough HD space for a pretty huge music collection. Most people don’t collect videos yet. But if they do, they’re still more likely than not covered with the 2TB drives available today. They’re covered with half that, most likely. The only real exception is hoarders. But the technology has surpassed the need and this happened some time ago. That’s why the focus is on better and not bigger hard drives. Solid-State Drives, available at sizes a fraction the size of regular ones, are becoming increasingly available. The people don’t need more space, but they need the drive integrity that SSDs offer. Also, portability has become an important thing with pocket drives (not to mention thumb drives).

Now, processors will keep getting faster and hard drives larger because there is a non-trivial segment of the population that will have increasing needs. Businesses can never have too much HD space. Certain tasks can never have too much processing power. But what we see from here is an ever-increasing divide between what the power-user needs and what the average user needs. Since the R&D money has already been spent, the huge hard drives used on corporate servers will be made available to everyone else. But people won’t need them. Almost nobody is anxiously awaiting a 3TB hard drive. The 1TB drives just go in computers cause it’s an impressive number and it’s available and cheap.

This sort of thing does require something of a mind-shift among buyers who are used to things being rated by numbers. That’s something I ran into years ago when it came to CD-ROM speeds. I told people “For what you (and 99% of the public) do, you don’t need a 24x CD ROM. You really don’t. It’s faster, but without purpose outside particular tasks. A 12x will do you just fine. They’d end up getting the 24x anyway because they had internalized that CD-ROM speed matters (and when you were talking about 1x vs 2x or 2x vs 4x, it did!). Then, of course, burners became commonplace and that was a place where speed really did (and does) matter.

All of this really puts the computer industry in a bind because it’s getting harder and harder to convince people to upgrade every three years or so. I am convinced that they used to intentionally short RAM on stock models because they always lowballed that very important component and it made computers seem obsolete (and thus in need of replacing) sooner. But with RAM so cheap they don’t even do that anymore. Another catalyst for upgrades, the latest and greatest Windows OS, is also something of a moot point because Windows 7, as neat as it is, does not actually represent importance in upgrading over XP as did XP over 2000 and (particularly) 2000 over 98. Half of the buzz that Win7 gets is that it’s not Vista and so looks really good by comparison, but most people still don’t need to upgrade. Thankfully, they made it really pretty, and that helps.

This is one of the reasons for Apple’s recent success. This is something that they get. They don’t need a better product. They need a more pleasant one. And they deliver it. One of the big ways in which sideways upgrading has manifested itself is through fragmentation. Apple is jumping onto this with Apple TV and the iPad. the iPad is only for a subsection of the population, but it is the perfect item for these people. Those of us that want something different scratch our head and ask why they didn’t make it so that it can do this or do that and what is it supposed to replace anyway… but it doesn’t have to replace anything. That’s the genius of it. People don’t need to replace their old laptops cause their old laptops work fine. So they created something new that their laptop can’t do. I’m old school enough that I prefer devices that can do more, but it’s becoming more and more apparent that there are huge profits to be made in things that can do less but are more reliable and easy/fun to use in that more limited capacity. They can blow off the bargain-shoppers who want to limit how much they spend with the Mac and blow off the business/serious users with an iPhone that is not remotely as professionally-friendly as the alternatives and blow off the geeks that want to tinker away to get it exactly as they want it. We’re moving towards specific products for specific people rather than the bigger-faster-better that can do more.

I don’t fancy myself much of a futurist, so take my predictions for what they are worth. But this is what I see happening all around us. You should always be careful before saying “the assumptions of yesterday must be replaced” cause that’s the sort of crap that caused the Bubble of the ’90’s, but the assumptions of yesterday must be replaced. Actually, they already have been. Moore’s Law remains in effect – more or less – but has become increasingly irrelevant.

In response to this WSJ piece, I wrote a comment on League of Ordinary Gentlemen that I wanted to reproduce:

Imagine how much more successful you would be if you locked your kid in the basement with nothing but a chair, a light, and a bunch of books. Then they’d read Dickens like the dickens. No need to go crazy, of course. You can let them out for school and little league and stuff. Of course, when all the kids are talking about video games that he’s never played and TV shows he knows nothing about, he will be suitably insulated from the ability to make friends by virtue of the fact that he will have little to talk about except a bunch of books nobody else has read and little league. He won’t be able to talk about Major League Baseball cause he won’t be able to watch any games, but I’m sure they’ll be just as interested in the triple he hit on Tuesday night than the local pennant race.

Now, if we’re going to be sincere about this, we also have to watch what they read. As Mr. Spence points out, if you let them read what they’re interested in you’re actually just coddling them. Better to stick to non-fiction since fiction is full of useless things that may be “riveting” and “engrossing” but we’ve already established that it’s not important that they enjoy themselves by their own standards. They’ll learn more reading books about molecular biology. Or the dictionary.

There would be exceptions, of course. You would want them to read the classics, so that you can brag to all of your friends that your 6th grader has read Moby Dick. Unlike their peers, your peers matter.

I’m not going to argue that reading is not a good thing and that young boys would be better off if they read more. Nor am I going to argue that fart books are the literary equivalent of Moby Dick or that video games are just as good for kids as reading.

However, I find the entire premise behind this really distasteful. Basically, if you bore kids enough they will have no choice but to read. If you leave them only those books that you are sure they must find interesting then they will find those books interesting. And it’s true, to an extent, but that’s not what reading is for. I don’t argue that you should let kids do whatever they want or everything their peers are allowed to do, but surely there is some sort of balance to be struck here. Isn’t there?

Is reading (not just reading, but reading precisely what you want them to be reading) really so important that you would deprive them of the alternatives? Deprive them of the “recreational internet” which is actually full of all manner of stuff they can learn about the second it pique their interest? Deprive them of movies which allow them not just to construct the imagery as best they can but actually experience things happening right before their eyes? Or the thrill and excitement of not just reading about exciting things but actually sort of experiencing them and working your way through them in the form of video games? Is anything but text on a page illegitimate?

I have no love for video games. The only two gaming consoles I have are the PlayStation 2 and the N64, which is one generation and two generations displaced from current. But man, the more I think about the attitude presented in this piece the more it brings out the intemperate side of me. By all means, make sure that they’re not living their lives in a digital world. But don’t deprive them of the experiences that they can provide.

Via Newsome, an article about a new case that specializes in keeping PCs quiet:

I ran into no problems or glitches moving the guts of the computer into the new case. The whole process took me less than an hour. When I was done, I reconnected all the cables to the rebuilt machine, plugged in the power cord and hit the On button.

And I could barely hear a thing.

At first, I thought something was wrong, because there almost was no sound to be heard from the PC. I could see the blue power indicator on the front, and my monitors showed the bootup process proceeding, but there was almost no fan sound at all.

I’ve been doing some computer building lately, and I know what Silverman means about thinking something was wrong. Other than monitor-output, which seems to take a few seconds, the only ways I know the computer are on are the LEDs and that the fan is running. But I can’t hear the fan, only see it. And this is in an open case!

Loud computers have been a bane on me for a while now. Mostly because Clancy is not as hard-of-hearing as I am and she notices these things far more than I do and I want to keep things quiet for her. Even so, she has pointed out the noise and it’s oddly started bothering me more since. I actually replaced the computer hooked up to the television with a laptop primarily (though not solely) for noise. I replaced the fan first and the new fan was quiet for all of two days before it started making the same racket. Not long afterwards, though, the laptop started getting loud. Now I am using a different laptop.

It seems that on the whole, fans have gotten a lot better than they used to be. I couldn’t find a quiet fan for my (2001) PCs, but all of the (CPU) fans on my new computers seem quiet. This came as quite a surprise as they sort of make a racket. I have since discovered that the offender is the little tiny fan on my video cards. Both of them! They make 100x more sound than any of my PC or case fans do. You can unplug the fan on these video cards, but they respond with reduced functionality (most inconveniently, at the moment, no multi-monitor). The entire notion that video cards should have their own fan is surprising to me, but it does seem that’s where a lot of the heat is generated these days. I know on some of my louder laptops, it’s the GPU’s (graphic processor unit) temperature and not the CPU’s that is causing the fan to go into overdrive.

I made sure that my new video card was fan-free. I would rather be able to buy my own case fans and whatnot to try to keep it cool. And I don’t really game, so I don’t need a particularly good video card (not sure what I’m going to do when-if I next want to capture video, though). This is complicated a bit by the fact that our computer room is hot, hot, hot. The previously mentioned laptop (a 2003 model) that was too loud in the living room in Cascadia apparently kicks into a racket-making overdrive in this room even when the computer isn’t doing much.

The case that Silverman got cost somewhere near $100, which as far as a specialty case goes isn’t all that bad. My large cases for housing lots of hard drives cost $80, though it did include a decent power supply. But it seems to me that with the necessity of increased speed and dexterity mattering less and less, quality-of-life issues like sound ought to be getting more attention and they should be making fans quieter (rather than having to have better insulation). The good news is that if my new PCs are any indication, they are.

Divx6: Would you like to upgrade to Divx 8.0? It comes with tons of new features and a better codec and it’s better than Divx6 in every possible way!

Me: No thanks

{one week later}

Divx6: Would you like to upgrade to Divx 8.0? It comes with tons of new features and a better codec and it’s better than Divx6 in every possible way!

Me: No thanks

{over and over again}

Divx6: Would you like to upgrade to Divx 8.0? It comes with tons of new features and a better codec and it’s better than Divx6 in every possible way!

Me: Okay, fine. I am tired of arguing about this. Upgrade.

Divx6: Yay!

{Ten minutes later}

Divx8: You have a trial period of 15 days.

Me: Trial period? What? I had a license!

Divx8: You had a license for Divx6. You have to pay for Divx8 if you want to use it. What, do you think our programmers work for free?

Me: Well, I already paid for Divx6 and Divx6 worked just fine. Uninstall.

Divx8: Noooooooo…

{After the uninstallation of Divx8 and reinstallation of Divx6}

Divx Installer: Are you sure you want to install Divx6? Divx8 is available.

Me: Install Divx6!

Divx Installer: {sigh} Okay.

{Upon opening Divx6 for the first time}

Divx6: Would you like to upgrade to Divx 8.0? It comes with tons of new features and a better codec and it’s better than Divx6 in every possible way!

ICANN and Verisign are universalizing Top-Level Domains. For those of you that don’t know what that means, the most common TLDs are .com, .net, .edu, and so on. Soon we will be able to have just about any TLD that we want.

I agree with Slate’s Farhad Manjoo. While this may have been helpful five or ten years ago, it’s not particularly helpful now. And indeed, the problem that existed worked itself out and so wasn’t even necessary then. It turns out that getting used to longer URLs was just as handy as getting used to TLDs.

When I first started getting on the Internet, I was disappointed (though not surprised) that truman.com was taken. At the time, it seemed odd to have both your first and last name as a domain name. But time moved on and first and last names are far, far, far more common than not. Indeed, a lot of people have to stick a middle initial in there cause some other guy or gal had the gumption of having the same first and last name. That might vindicate the need for more TLDs, but I don’t think it does. Is it really that much less difficult to remember johncsmith.com than johnsmith.someothertld? The Internet has gotten large enough that we’re just as likely to google what we’re looking for anyway. The same applies to businesses except moreso. For instance, johnsondesign.com is just as easy to remember as johnson.design and “Johnson Design” in Google or Bing is easier to remember still.

I think that having more than just .com and .net is a good thing, but I think that the slow and deliberate pace they were moving at before took care of it, more or less. Hitcoffee.com was taken when I started this site. Though I had no real problem with taking .net, I was still disappointed. Mostly for people that wanted to just type in the name and would default to .com. Truthfully, I would have probably gone with .us if that TLD would have allowed me to maintain my anonymity. In the end, if you don’t have .com (and you’re not an educational institution with .edu, government with .gov, and so on), it really doesn’t matter what you have. Your main choice is between complicatedurl.com and perhaps simplerurl.othertdl.

I think that the .tv and .fm TLDs are great for sites offering video and audio content respectively. Those are offered because the nations that “own” those TLDs, Tuvalu and Micronesia, lease them out. So it’s a sort of win-win. I’ve often wondered why individual states didn’t offer this. Since the TLD and indeed the URL doesn’t matter all that much anymore, it gives people the opportunity to be creative or align ourselves with a particular state. Back when I thought I was going to be a lifelong Delosa resident, I would have easily taken willtruman.da.us (DA being the state’s postal code). All of the states have their own postal code under US. In fact, it used to be that cities had these complicated URLs like www.colosse.ci.da.us (CI for city, DA for Delosa) or www.colosse.co.da.us (CO for county) and some still do. That would be kind of neat, though I think they decided it was too complicated. And the reason that they don’t offer what I wish they would is probably because most people would prefer complicatedurl.com over a really complicated URL and TLD.

In the end, though, people have generally gotten used to more and more complicated URLs and often URLs that have little to do with the name of the site itself (I considered going with trumwill.com with hitcoffee.com being taken, even though I was never going to name the blog eponymously). I think more than anything this is to offer the appropriate entities new revenue streams. It’ll end up being like the much-publicized .cc TLD. Some guy bought off the national TLD of Cocos Island figuring that being the fourth (at the time) major available TLD would be a big moneymaker. He may have made some money, though it never really took off even though back then there was so much more speculation and possibilities that there are now.

Tangentially, when writing my novels, I had to come up with some website names. One of the problems I had was that I didn’t want to use real website names. The ability to find unused URLs was difficult, to say the least, so I decided to invent new TLDs. Except that I wanted them to be standard sounding. What I ultimately ended up doing – a tradition that has continued throughout all of my novels – was simply shortening it to two letters. So .com became .co, .net to .nt, .org to .or, and so on. I got the idea through British websites, which use .co instead of .com (followed by the .uk country code). It was very convenient with the exception of having to refer to the .com bubble as the .co bubble and whatnot, which was kind of goofy. But I figure people got the idea.

One of the last things I read last night was a comment on a blog that said “DUDE! You weren’t watching Lost?! I was busy getting my mind blown. It was Claire the whole time?! What the f*ing Hell!” Knowing that the Internet was discussing the final episode of Lost that I had not seen yet, I determined that the Internet was a dangerous place to be.

Now, I didn’t know what to make of the comment about Claire. I pass it on precisely because I can inform you that nothing was ruined by that comment. I half thought at the time that it was mostly a head fake. But the next one might not be. So I spent the entire day off the Internet except for an email I sent. It turned out well because there was something that I really needed to get done. The downside is that Hit Coffee was dormant. Anyway, so lest anyone fear because I did not do my weekly Ghostland post and was silent all day today, all is right with the world.

I discovered right after having watched said episode of Lost that a friend of mind apparently ceased to exist. I know this because his Facebook profile was gone. And as we all know, if you don’t exist on Facebook you don’t exist. Fortunately, I got a Friend request from someone with the exact same name and a profile picture that was shockingly similar to my departed friend’s. So I don’t think that the old guy will be missed.

As for the episode itself… I need to think on it more before sharing my thoughts.

UPDATE: Uh oh, the third website I went to was Galley Slaves, where they had a post up about the season finale of Fringe, which I have not yet seen.