Speaker by Various Artists

I caught myself moaning about Google Map's low resolution the other day, before realising how completely absurd it was. I was sitting in my living room, and I could receive satelite images of anywhere on the planet, on demand, on my laptop. From friggin' space.

We're totally living in the sci-fi future already, with instant electronic access to what is practically the sum of human knowledge. W00T TCP/IP! W00T indeed.

(I guess that means that human comprehension - and by extension, humans - are now the bottleneck in the system.)

So one of the things I would look for in teaching children would be to do everything possible to help them understand that they really have to think about the information that they get, because they're going to get a lot of it and some of it's not going to be very good.

......and some things never change.....

@Keith Ng: use Google Mars... then you'll really freak out :-) I had a high resolution (NASA) mars photo as my desktop image for a while and I kept marveling at the idea that I was having access to what another planet looks like from my chair at home. Arsum.

As for TCP/IP - it's been great for me. Apart from a few early years when there were BBSs and dial-up modems at dazzling speeds of 300 baud (that's 0.03k for you 'ung ones), I occasioned to stumble upon the Internet in the mid 80's though a chap called David Dix. "Unix is where it's at", he evangelised. "Drop that silly Windows and OS/2 now and join the (Internet) revolution". He sold me a cheap-ish copy of Xenix/386, and I wrote a 4 line BBS in C.

I was the third owner of a privately-held NZ domain name, delphi.gen.nz, at a then-exorbitant cost of $200 a year ('87!), and our email/usenet (uucp) feed came through the DSIR (now broken into several CRIs). All of this care of the real architects of the *public* NZ internet: Paul, David, Ray and others (your names are starting to fade). We supplied free Internet email, Fidonet, FTP by (e)mail and Usenet access to anyone who was interested. In the end - we had three lines with 2.4k modems, and one with the $2000 wholesale NZ manufactured 9k6 modem. It was so fast...

Of the two others that owned domain names in those days, both survive today: Actrix and kcbbs (aka kc.net), with Actix the commercial winner. This was BEFORE the IHUGs, the IGRINs, the Waves. And some years before the Xtras, the Clear Nets...

My own ISP creation, Web World, survives, sold as a brick in the corporate fabric that started as Page 1, now First Contact, but is now a proud 14 years old in an industry that is perhaps only 15 years old at that.

The Plug, a "zine" (before there were blogs) managed to score a Netguide award, partially due to the fact it published Hard News in exchange for an insultingly minuscule honorarium, has faded into history. Still...

... I mean, I had Russel on my payroll dude... I 0wn3d da man...

(chuckle)

TCP/IP has been good to me, and continues to be so.

Happy birthday. Belatedly...

and good to see Russel has gone from strength to strength since. I had nothing to do with it.

He too, is indebted, to TCP/IP.