1. all of our basic needs were taken care of?  Some sort of minimum living standard is created.  Each person gets a room or apartment type dwelling in some sort of housing structure?  That space is heated, has running water, internet (by that time that will cover all media anyway) and any other needs.  Electricity/energy usage could be set for some free amount.  If you want more you have to pay for it.
2. medical became a non-issue?  Maybe every one gets any needed medical care they need. Perhaps nano-tech gets to the point of us not needing doctors?
3. food was easy to get?  No one would starve.  Maybe some minimum menu that included only healthy food you could really live on.  You could spend your entire life eating just that food and be healthy.  Any one asking would get any thing on that menu.  Maybe it is in the cafeteria of the housing structure.
4. our current monetary and banking system failed?  A dollar would be come worthless.  How would you get ahead with out “money”  Some thing would have to replace it.

What came to mind is instead of dollars or credits we have various points.  We could trade thos points for other needs and desires.  Some form of Google ranking meets MySpace/FaceBook.  You earn varius points and rankings and then trade those for things you want.  Lets use “good Samaritan points”  or GS for short.  You help some one move and they give you some GS.  On your way home you pick up some trash/ litter and this is cought on camera and posted to some video page.  A bunch of people give you some GS points.   You can earn them any way people decide to give them.  Now lets say the soup of the day in the cafeteria is getting boring and you want a good home cooked meal.  You look on line and find some one who has a restaurant with a high food prep ranking for the food you want.  You go there and you have to give up so many of your GS points.  Now the restaurant does not get them, they go away.  BUT if you like the food you grant some points to there good food ranking.  Now this could be expanded to almost all areas of life.

OK so it is some what utopian.  I don’t think it would really work in real life.  BUT I think it could make an interesting back drop for a SciFi book/show.  No matter how utopian a society is there will always be some one bucking the system.  Some one who is criminal just becasue they can or want to be.

Leonardo da Vinci made drawings of airplanes 400 years before the Wright brothers. One of his glider designs was later built and it flew!

In his novel, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne describes a nuclear submarine 70 years before the first real Nuclear sub was built.  The real one was named after the Nautilus in Vern’s story. It is also 20 years before nuclear power was starting to be discovered.

In other Sci Fi stories various futures are dreamed up.  Those futures range from utopia to post apocalypse.  What should scare you is that any of them are possible.  With imagination the writer has extrapolated what can happen from now till what ever is happening in the story.  Some of them are just fluff, violent fluff at that.  Some of them tho really are possible.  It is those that we should pay attention to.  Many of them are social commentary.  Others are telling of how past events could replay them selves in the future and how technology may affect the outcome.  Next time your watching a show where society is different than our own ask your self how did they get there and what can we do to be like that too, or should we do to prevent it.

Similar problems happen with other software.  Microsoft Works and Publisher files ONLY work witht he same version they were saved with.  Lose those programs and your sunk.  Atleast they did not put in a time bomb kill switch.  Update your computer? You dont have a licence to install the old version on your new compuetr, if it will even go.  If you find your self in this situation save the Works file as Ritch Text (.rtf)  Almost any word processor can open that.  With Publisher your sunk.  There are othe examples but enough ranting and bashing for now.

What’s the solution?  Open Standards.  A friend sen’t me a document he made in OpenOffice.org I happend to be on a Linux computer I had not installed OpenOffice.org on.  I did not realise this tho.  I just cliked on the file and it opend, in AbiWord. No probem.  The fie format is open.  Infact just to see if I could I opend an OpenOffice.org file in Firefox,  It opend it, Pictures and all!  So even if any one of thos went away you could still read YOUR fie.

What about the light show?  Well if they stored the file in a human readable form then even if they go away you could open the file and retrieve your data to use in anoter control program.  Or make a quick tweek in a text editor, yes I do this with other programs.  At least I would not feel locked into them.

Comanies, provide a way for your customers to get at there own data if you go away.  Consumers, DEMAND IT!

As the years went on I had the 286,386, 486SX, 486DX, 486DX2, Pentium 60 and so on. Around 10 to 12 years ago I built an AMD K6-2 based computer and bought an Apple Mac G4-400. I still have those. In fact I am using the G4-400 to write this. I have a modern OS on it (Fedora 10 PPC Linux) and it runs fine for web surfing, word processing, E-mail. The only real limitation is lack of Flash player for PPC. I guess no Youtube.com. The K6-2 is not used right now. As I remember it has a bad component. But it is still here and I could fix it if I wanted. But why?

In the last 10 years there has been an important change in computers. We no longer need the post powerful computer made JUST to get work done. I would bet 99% of home users (read web surfing, word processing, and E-mail) would be just fine with this old mac G4-400 if it could play Youtube with out problems. The K6-2 could, it has a Flashplayer available for it. We only need the high power units for CPU and video intensive games. In reality there are very few games that NEED the most powerful computers. But then I am not a computer gamer. But I am a power user.

We start running in to problems as the operating system (OS) needs more power “just to run” Microsoft Vista is one example. It does not run on our laptops. We have a set of 1.6 GHz, 512 Meg ram laptops that will not run Vista, even tho that was our only choice at the store. They are SLOOWER than this G4-400. So painful that Vista has been removed from them. The wife’s now has Fedora 10 Linux only. Mine has Fedora and XP pro. Under Fedora 10 they run GREAT. Fast boot up, full DVD quality video from out MythTV server, audio editing, graphics editing. I can have a dozen applications open spread across 4 desktops and slide from one to another as needed. All this from a $300 clearance computer that CAN’T run M$ Vista. Oh and the kiker? The linux partitions of the hard drive are encrypted. This is done at the basic level of the OS. It is in place BEFORE the real install starts! Other than a nice long pass phrase at start up I don’t even notice it. If some one takes it all they get is the laptop. They can’t even look at my web browsing history or file names.

So next time your looking to “upgrade” that “OLD SLOW Computer” Think about what you really need it to do. If it is running Windows XP maybe it just needs a clean reinstall. (DON’T FORGET TO BACK UP YOUR DATA!” If it is running VIsta (or any Windows variant) maybe a true upgrade to Linux is in order.

Have fun computing!