[sift this] The Dad came out of the 60's an electronic engineer with Hewlett-Packard. This made for a household full of the latest and greatest electronic doo-dads. I fondly remember the blank stares I'd get when telling the kids in high school, "It's a satellite dish -- we have more TV channels than God."

Frequent visits to local electronic stores are required for the offspring of the Dad. The fact that once could not afford every new piece of hardware was never an excuse for not being aware of its capabilities. The most recent visit to Fry's yielded the latest attempt at getting consumers on the Internet, WebTV.

The idea that folks should be able to surf the Web from the comfort of their own living room makes sense at first glance. The Internet is A world ripe with information. Since personal computers aren't cheap why not just sell folks a set-top box that makes their television a computer. Makes sense.

There are two fundamental problems with WebTV, the first of which was raised when we received the following message in our mailbox, "WebTV doesn't look right." Baffled, I chatted with some co-workers who pointed out the obvious: Web content is designed for viewing on high-resolution monitors at close range (probably like the one you're looking at now). Take a second to notice how close your face is to your monitor -- probably within 2-3 feet. Now, move yourself to your living room and grab some couch. Your face is roughly 5-10 feet away from the screen, making this page unreadable.

WebTV gets around this problem by altering Web content on the fly via a proxy server. For example, the text size on this page would be increased so as to be readable on the average TV. This is ludicrous solution. Web site designers have been complaining since the inception of the Net that they want absolute control over the size and placement of objects on a Web page. Now, WebTV is changing the font size on every page which, in turns, shifts the placement of every object. This is likely to not only make web sites ugly, but in some cases, unusable. (How about sites that don't design with text and just use graphics?)

The second problem with WebTV is the amount of interaction it requires. When Mr. and Mrs. America sit down in front of their TV's, they expect to be entertained. They want their content packed and pushed through the airwaves, straight into their homes, and they don't care much whether it is interspersed with advertisements. The Web is an entirely interactive experience that requires the participation of brain cells that are normally dormant during TV shows.

This problem is already being solved by the industry latest buzz word, "Pushable Content." Information is customized for individuals and pushed to them a la the Pointcast metaphor. Other current examples of pushed content look remarkably like e-mail.

The idea of combining your television set and Internet access remains solid. As the amount of bandwidth to the individual increases, so will the richness and variety of content. WebTV was the first out of the gate with a working Internet set-top box, so they must face the first and hardest set of problems, but this still makes them king of the hill of the bleeding edge.

[sift this] The news week was dominated by the Microsoft Media Monster that was determined to convince the world that Office 97 (all several hundred megabytes of it) was the cornerstone of its Internet strategy. Oddly enough, the Microsoft product probably most useful to folks managing a web site wasn't even included in the "productivity suite."

Microsoft Visual SourceSafe is a version control package. Now don't get scared, keep reading. When someone first said "version control" to me, I bolted and came to regret it. If you manage any type of project where one or more people are editing the same set of files, I'm about to make your life simpler.

SourceSafe is mostly just a database that lives on a network server. A Windows front end allows users to copy or "check-in" any type of file into this database for storage. Once in the database, anyone else with SourceSafe can copy down this file to their local hard drive for editing. When they're done, they simply check that file back into the SourceSafe database.

What's the big deal, right? This can be done with simple network directories. The key difference is that when an edited version of a file is copied into the database, SourceSafe determines the differences between the file already in the database and the file being copied in. Those differences are stored in the database, as well. With that stored information available, a user can copy down any version of that file to their local hard drive.

Think about that. Better yet, picture this: you've been working on the big report for four weeks now. You suddenly realize that information you hacked off thinking it was extraneous is now integral. You check your back-up file, but that only stores changes since your last save. What to do? The answer is version control.

However, version control's primary use has been in managing source code trees in software projects. This gives version control a geeky aura that makes it inaccessible to folks who'd get the most benefit from it.

Next week: Visual SourceSafe� because brain dead is better.