Nortel isn't letter perfect
Nortel Networks sells globe-girdling telecom equipment. But it's run into some trouble getting a simple voice-mail system to pronounce a single letter correctly.
A Toronto law firm recently asked Nortel to change its voice mail system to pronounce the 26th letter of the alphabet as "zed" instead of the boorish American "zee," because of a growing number of complaints from clients tired of hearing American inflections from an automated attendant.
According to a Canadian Press account, the complaints have been sparked by a popular anti-American Molson beer commercial in which a Canadian everyman yells how much better the Great White North is than the gun-toting, assimiliationist yahoos to the south who mispronounce letters and don't even know enough to call a couch a "chesterfield," for goodness sake!
But, the Canadian Press reports, "Several officials from Nortel insisted the technology to make the switch from 'zee' to 'zed' was simply not yet available."
Or at least, they insisted until they realized that wasn't going to look too good in their home country's media: "But by mid-afternoon Friday, following several calls from a reporter, the company's director of corporate communications said Nortel would change the 'zee' to 'zed' as soon as possible."
Copyright infringement or free speech?
Somehow, you knew it would happen: Microsoft takes an open standard, puts proprietary extensions on it, then gets upset when somebody posts a document detailing those extensions.Earlier this week, Slashdot opened a discussion on Microsoft's extensions to Kerberos, long an open security spec. It wasn't long before somebody posted the company's copyrighted (and NDA'd) details. And it didn't take Microsoft too long to demand the document be pulled down.
For now, Slashdot is holding firm, claiming First Amendment rights.
GötterRedmondung
The Register is another one of those cheeky British observers of the high-tech world (one doubts an American site would come up with a headline like the above).Their take on Microsoft's latest court filings: "The Potomac will foam with blood, Silicon Valley will be turned into a vast dust-bowl, the U.S. economy will be destroyed and starving software developers will head back East, choking the Interstates with convoys of BMW Z3s. This isn't quite what Microsoft says will happen if it gets broken up, but its court filings of yesterday stop only marginally short of plague of boils territory."
Meanwhile, the Daily Feed has posted an audio report on MS Break Up Proposals You Didn't Hear, including one to break it into 26 different companies, "one for each letter of the alphabet. MS-A gets Access, MS-B gets Bob, and so on."
5/10/00
A useful Java applet
Well, useful for wasting all your time, that is. Sodaconstructor brings up a wire-frame thingee that walks across the screen, bumps against one side, then reverse and walks the other way.
No, wait, stay with me on this one. What's cool is that you can change
its environment: Turn gravity off to see what happens. Turn auto-
reverse off and watch it endlessly smash what passes for its head
against the wall. Give it a jauntier walk by changing its mass from free
to fixed.
You can even pick it up (click on one of the dots that help compose its frame) and then watch it squirm as you race it around the "room" (if you actually like doing that, though, I'll bet you like tearing the wings off flies - the poor thing just flounces around getting more and more agitated).
Then try the same things on 10 other creeper-crawlers, from amoeba to pushmepullyou.
Before you know it, it's 5:00 and you're hosed because you realize you didn't get any work done today. But you don't care.
Now that was quick
Almost as soon as some enterprising kid found Yet Another HotMail Hole that would've let somebody break into a HotMail account via a JavaScript/HTML attachment, the free-mailer fixed the problem.
Metallica wins a round
So Napster says it is disabling the accounts of nearly 320,000 users whom rock band Metallica claims illegally traded its music over the MP3-swapping service (you know, the 320,000 people Metallica has sued in addition to Napster).However, Napster says any of those 320,000 people can get back to trading tracks by filling out a "counter notification" form on which they swear (on an electronic bible?) that they didn't try to defraud Metallica.
5/10/00
Glub
It's true: Sometimes you don't really appreciate something until it's gone.Take our LAN. Thanks to our crack IS department, it's one thing you never have any reason to complain about around here. It just works.
Or it did until yesterday afternoon. There I was, watching our broadband-access debate at N+I, when one of our IS guys rushed in to say they were shutting down the network; something about flooding the wiring closet. Huh?!? Who knew a RealVideo stream could generate so many packets?
Turns out he was being literal: water was cascading off of - and out of - our switches. Workers reconfiguring some space at the company on the floor above us managed to puncture the water main that, as we learned, runs right above our switch center.
And the newsroom ground to a halt. No network meant no access to our print publication system, our Web site, our graphics folders, e-mail, no nothin'. So of course I promptly went home.
Fortunately, the switches seemed to have dried out quickly - even if the carpet in the hall didn't, so we're back in business today (phew!). What are your worst wiring-closet disasters? Post 'em.
Hold that caffeine!
>From the "Can You Believe Somebody Gets Paid to Think Up Stuff Like This?" department comes word of a survey in which people were asked whether they'd give up caffeine for a week in exchange for $1,000.Answer: 75.8% of those polls said they would. Of course, you'd probably get some people to agree to eat bugs for a week for $1,000 (not here at Fusion Central, though - we'd hold out for at least $2,000). But why stop there? Why not ask people if they'd be willing to give up caffeine in exchange for some catnip tea?
5/09/00
The next denial-of-service attacker?
Could mstream be the next big security headache? You can see the hype storm beginning to build like a summer thunderstorm over this newest distributed denial-of-service app.According to a recent analysis by a team led by David Dittrich of the University of Washington, mstream is "more primitive" than better known bad boys, such as trinoo and TFN. However, it shows potential for wreaking havoc - it may be able to bring down a site with fewer remote clients than the others.
So take a look at mstream's source code, then break out the umbrella - just in case.
Helping the needy
So you've been lying awake feeling terrible about all the money that Metallica has lost due to scheming, conniving "fans" trading its tracks over Napster. You just know had badly Lars Ulrich and the boys must've been hurt to charge several hundred thousand fans with violations of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations act.Now it's time to do something. Get to PayLars.com right this second and make an online donation to keep Metallica in eyeliner.
Retirement plans
Given any thought to what you'll do with all your time once you retire? You could always move to Florida and take up returning stolen shopping carts to supermarkets. Or how about collecting air sickness bags?
5/08/00
Calculated risk
Oh, sure, Cisco just dropped 5.5 Big Ones on ArrowPoint Communications, which makes devices that perform URL switching.If all Cisco cared about was dynamic URLs, it could've saved itself a boatload by buying calculator-in-the-URL.
OK, so maybe calculator-in-the-URL doesn't do anything about relieving Web congestion. But it does let you get rid of that $9.95 calculator with the dead battery you're always forgetting to replace.
Follow the simple directions and you can solve complex mathematical equations by embedding your calculations in the URL. For example, click on this link:
Isn't that amazing?
It does means and mods, converts numbers into hex and octal values and even does things like sines and tangents.
But wait, there's more: You can use calculator-in-the-URL to send a meaningless greeting to someone on the occasion of his or her wedding. Now that's a calculator!
Addendum:
Reader Martin Machacek takes issue with the URL calculator because the URLs in question contain a dollar sign, which goes against accepted Internet practice, specifically RFC 1034. That means that many users won't be able to get to the calculator "unless your system has broken (non-compliant) DNS resolver talking to broken (non-compliant) DNS server."
The URLs resolve just fine here, but, sure enough, I got a DNS error when I tried them from an ISP I use.
Magnus Bodin, who came up with the site, writes to acknowledge the problem, although he adds: "I didn't want to waste subdomain namespace ;-)"
Then he pointed us to another tool he's built - a decimal URL converter, which takes a human readable domain name and turns it into a bunch of different numerical URLs (from 56-bit decimal to 32-bit octal). All of the numbers actually work as clickable URLs, except, he warns, on certain Macs with "silly IP stacks" and with some proxy servers. Quick test: if the following link works (you should get Fusion's home page), then you don't have a silly IP stack.
That's just great
Were we here at Fusion Central alone in thinking the dawn of a new millennium would rid us of one of the great annoyances of the 20th century: Lists of the greatest whatever of that late era?Alas, it is not to be. Only a few months late, the National Academy of Engineering has come out with its list of the Greatest Engineering Achievements of the 20th Century (joining such classic 20th-century lists as the greatest American songs and the greatest Assamese). Oh, well, let's take a look:
Top on the list: Electrification. Computers came in at 8, just above telephones at 9 (telephones? Um, guys, Bell actually invented the telephone in the 19th century). The Internet checked in at 13.
The last word on I Love You
Yes, yes, by now you're sick to death of stories about the virus and whether it was a Filipino woman in Manila or a German exchange student in Australia who unleashed the thing. You may not even care that Bill Gates claims a Microsoft breakup would mean more viruses (because if there's one thing you're more sick of than the Love Bug it's the Microsoft anti-trust case). Still, you might want to spend 30 seconds or so perusing Rob Rosenberger's I Love You rant.Rosenberger runs the Computer Virus Myths site - an excellent place to send all those users who send you "urgent" warnings about what turn out to be hoaxes. He has a thought or two on last week's attack, as well:
"First, ask yourself a simple question. Did the virus itself clog up your company's email system -- or did hysterical virus alerts clog up your company's email system?If your company got whacked by the ILoveYou virus, don't ask why it happened so quickly. Ask why it happened at all! Didn't the experts learn about this problem last year when Melissa struck? If your company virus expert says "we learned enough to react in minutes instead of hours," then you should ask why your firm still responds to viruses after the fact.
If someone blames Microsoft Windows or Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft Visual Basic Scripting, ask why antivirus software didn't stop the virus at the email gateway. "The attachment name said '.txt.vbs', yet your recommended antivirus solution couldn't recognize such a simple (and well known) trick. What gives?"
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