Even though this blog is fairly new, I’ve seen some interesting incoming search strings. Do any of my blogging visitors ever look at theirs? Let me answer some questions that I know people who have been here recently have been looking for.

Yes, it is possible to get caught breaking into someone else’s email account. You shouldn’t do it.

If your toaster smells like burning electronics you should stop using it and bring it back to the store immediately.

The Inspiron Mini 9 has a VGA port on the right side.

Speaking of breaking into email accounts. I did something almost as amazing as that uber hacker that got into Palin’s recently. There was a guy who was ordering merchandise on a credit card and with credentials that I didn’t think were valid, so I tried his email account (yahoo) and the password “password” and it worked. I called the FBI who forwarded me to a different government agency. It ended up being more trouble to report it than it was worth, and I don’t know if they ever caught the guy, but it was difficult explaining how I got all that information off the guy since I had “hacked” into his email account. Twas fun, but not hacking or cracking.

Have you gotten tired of these analogies yet? I saw yet another one of these on betanews today and had to cringe. You know, it is in no way fair to compare a toaster to a computer. People never did buy computers because they were appliances. People bought computers because you coud do so many different things with them. That’s changing a lot today as more people get online since there are people who genuinely have no interest in having a computer yet they do want to browse the web and read/write email. For those people the appliance idea works and I agree. You don’t want to have to do drop to a command prompt and type iexplore in order to launch a web browser, and you don’t want to wait two minutes for the computer to boot up. I’d argue that you don’t want to wait 30 seconds for your bread to get toasted either, but that’s beside the point.

If someone buys a computer and all they want it to do is browse the web and do email or wordprocessing then the argument they give is good. My argument is that everyone who bought computers in the beginning bought them because they were not limited to just a few applications. They wanted to be able to run anything they want and even program something new if they wanted to. I’m thinking of my first Apple IIe computer. It booted to a BASIC interpreter and was simple to start programming it. It is what got me interested in computers. If it popped up and only gave me the choices to do email or browse the web or write a document I would have quickly moved on to a different field of study.

I’m posing the opposite argument. What if your computer acted like your toaster?

Here we go – You plug in your computer (because you have to leave it unplugged when not in use or it could be a fire hazard) and nothing happens. You pull a fresh disk out of a package and stick it in the slot checking the expiration date first to make sure that the disk is still before its sell-by date. After doing that you push a lever and the computer turns on. Within seconds you start smelling burning electronics, but you are assured that’s supposed to happen. You have between 30 seconds and a minute to type some email before the lever flips up and the comptuer turns off again. You see that your disk is pretty melted, but you push thet lever back down again because you wanted to finish reading that chain email from your mom. You have 30 seconds to read the email again before it shuts off. This time the disk is pretty much toast and you have to get another one to try again. You proceed like this for ten minutes or so, literally burning through a stack of disks, until the computer finally decides that it’s overheated and needs to cool down before it will work again. While waiting, your mom calls and tells you that a piece of a disk broke off in her computer and started a little fire, so she lost all her email and has to buy another computer, but on the positive side her media will be compatible with the new one, so she doesn’t have to buy another loaf of disks.

So does that make any sense? Nah, and neither does arguing that the other way. It can be humorous, but there’s no logic in doing so and no reason to draw a correlation between the two machines. You might as well try to compare your automobile with your television. Yeah, can you imagine if you had to keep your foot on a pedal to keep the TV on, or if you pushed it too hard that the police would show up on your doorstep? Or what if you got in your car and spent 30 minutes pressing buttons flipping through channels until finally realizing that you weren’t going to get anywhere you wanted to go right now, but if you waited until 8pm it would go somewhere you wanted to go but during the journey you’d have to take a 5 minute break every 9-15 for a detour down an alley filled with all kinds of junk to buy that you aren’t interested in.

I’m sure nothing I’ve said will stop this nonsensical comparing because, after all, it can be humorous. If you were fortunate enough to stop by and read this, I hope you’ll think twice about making such a comparison in any kind of seriousness. There’s just nothing logical about it.

My computer acts like a computer because that’s what I wanted it to do. I didn’t want a toaster (email appliance/webtv) so I didn’t buy one. You know, the webtv thing didn’t do so well either, so I’m thinking that most people still probably like the versatility of their computers. I’m not sure I’d like to spend hundreds of dollars on an appliance that only does email and web browsing. Even a UMPC does more than that, especially one with Linux.