Now that Microsoft has given its quick reveal of the new Xbox One game console / set-top box, we have a pretty good idea of what we should be expecting once the machine comes out. We know how it'll be controlled; we know what games we'll be playing on it; and we know how it will keep us connected and entertained.

But we don't know if people will use all these new things. Are we ready to look at our game consoles as more than a game console? Are we already there? I mean, we all use Netflix on our machines, right? May as well let them run our TV viewing too, right?

Right?

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I've known my friend Jeff since I was 2 years old. He was one year ahead of me in school, but in everything else -- little league, school, girls -- we were extremely competitive. We both had two sisters and looked to one another as brothers and yardsticks for prepubescent success. He was better at baseball and I usually had better luck with the ladies. Being better at baseball helped him with the ladies and having a way with the girls made the baseball thing kind of irrelevant. In short, I was better.

I saw Jeff last week, and as we reminisced about the good old days of baseball and babes, he reminded me of what he called The Great Computer Cold War of 1982.

"The great what?" I asked him.

Filed under: Misc, Software, Apple

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My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20. It raged with 3.5K of RAM, a high-speed cassette deck, and built-in BASIC. I used to copy game programs string-by-string from the back of COMPUTE! magazine -- tens of thousands of lines of code -- and small errors were not an option. One syntax error and the program wouldn't work. When I did make those errors, I'd go back, line by line, and check for differences. There was nothing -- at the time -- more annoying than seeing hours of code crash because of one bad POKE statement.

That digital fastidiousness has stuck with me since. I keep all my computers' files in order, keep operating systems updated, backup constantly to a remote storage device and quickly go after a machine that's behaving strangely. The net result, and I may be tempting fate, is that I have never had a computer completely fail in the thirty years I've been using them.

Filed under: Misc

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It's funny how things come back around. When I was growing up in the '80s, music was looking back at the '50s and '60s and re-creating it into some of the best bands the world has seen. Paul Weller wouldn't have become the songwriter he is had he not grown up on the Beatles. Likewise, Paul McCartney wouldn't have become the genius that he is had he not been raised on Little Richard. And now, bands are looking back at the '80s and re-doing that explosive era -- with both good and bad results that I will not go into here lest I make new enemies.

Culture is cyclical, and we're beginning to see that technology is bound to follow that same rinse-and-repeat formula.

Filed under: Misc

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