Babel Fish as threat to humanity

By Adam Gaffin
Network World Fusion, 05/26/00

Yes, indeed, a quick way to amuse yourself is to feed some well known English saying into Babel Fish and see how it mangles it on the way from a foreign language back into English.

. Author Andrew Odewahn, though, sees something more sinister in Babel Fish and its automaton friends like Ask Jeeves. As such tools proliferate, we will adapt ourselves to their quirks rather than vice-versa (he points out how people with Palm Pilots change their handwriting to get Graffiti to work).

The danger is that systems like Babel Fish monkey with our most fundamental tool--language itself.

Read his essay and ponder whether we're headed toward Orwell's Newspeak.

We been had!

The Register reports that the potato-powered Web server is just a joke. The giant Mr. Potato Heads of Rhode Island, however, ARE for real. At least, I think they are.

Life in dotcom land

It may not be all it's cracked up to be. Just ask the good folks of Half.com, Ore., which changed its name from Halfway to try to bring in some bucks from e-tailer half.com (did I just write "e-tailer?" No, I didn't). USA Today reports life continues pretty much the same boring way it always has in the town halfway between Robinette and Cornucopia.

"I thought it was a neat thing. But as far as boosting business in our town - I don't think it's done anything," said 35-year-old Meriann Digges, who has run Wild Bill's - a downtown lounge that offers the only breakfast in town - for the last five years.

Maybe they could make Dotcomguy an honorary citizen.

5/25/00

Do you suffer from PC rage?

Admit it. At least once, you've wanted to do serious bodily harm to a computer (if not the user sitting in front of it). South Africans, apparently, are beginning to act out on their urges, according to a survey by Symantec and ITWeb:

In a recent PC attack, a two-year-old computer was brutally shot repeatedly until it was a mangled mess, in what psychologists are calling an ever-increasing wave of PC rage sweeping the country.

Symantec set up a PC Rage Web site that features details of the survey plus descriptions of the malady (along with a rage "questionnaire" that is, in fact, a cleverly disguised attempt to get your name on a mailing list).

Hamsterdance, the sequel

Hamsterdance has fallen on hard times. Unable to capitalize on its initial, if mind-rotting, success, it's devolved into an annoying blend of ugly backgrounds and endless pop-up windows.

To the rescue comes Hampsterdance 2, a new site that uses Shockwave to breathe new life into the genre. You can speed up (or slow down) the hamsters, even move individual rodents around the screen. Only drawback: They've sped up the disco theme song, and it reaches kill-the-guy-in-the-next-cubicle stage a lot faster.

Toolin' around

Think Amazon.com's toolbar is getting a bit cluttered? You ain't seen nothin' yet.

You snooze, you lose

On Monday, alert readers had the chance to see a silly Cisco test page. Cisco's now locked it up behind a password system (but if you're really bored give it a try).

5/24/00

Piping up

I admit it - I'm not a programmer (something the actual programmers on our staff will be more than happy to second). So maybe that's why I find it hard to understand how somebody could get all worked up over people who use commas instead of "vertical bar characters" or pipes or whatever you call them (you know: | ) to separate data in, um, "comma separated values" files.

Spy capers at Time Warner

The New York Times has a fun little story today (free registration required) on how cable company and would be new-media giant Time Warner checked out its competition in Houston.

Along with their paychecks this month, Time Warner employees there were offered $100 bonuses if they would call up Southwestern Bell, order DSL and then report the results (and cancel the service if they got it). The goal was to see exactly where Southwestern Bell was offering DSL so Time Warner could figure out where to push cable modems.

The mind reels at the thought that this company could soon own much of the Internet. Rather than cooking up a stupid plot sure to lead to public embarrassment the moment it was revealed, why didn't Time Warner just go to Southwestern Bell's handy DSL lookup service and find out exactly where the telco offers DSL? Mucky-mucks at Time Warner say they were shocked, shocked when they learned of the scheme, blamed on the ever anonymous mid-level types.

Blenderphone

Yesterday we talked about potato-powered Web servers. Today Fusion's roving eye is caught by the blenderphone, which is exactly what it sounds like: "The 'ringer' is the blender motor,which pulses like a telephone bell, except angrier. To answer, pick up the pitcher out of the base and put it to your ear. Usually, the caller can hear the motor spinning down just after you pick it up."

Yet Another Domain Battle

It's battle of the domain names, Part CXXII, as kids cartoon/merchandiser chunkymonkey.com takes on Windows developer chunkymunky.com. The latter's taken down all its content due to a suit from the former, although it thoughfully provides links to an offshore version. See if you can see any similarities between the two sites (a key complaint in the suit).

5/23/00

Potato-powered Web sites

Fusion's headquartered in Massachusetts, which has some of the highest electric rates in the country. So the news that somebody has built a potato-powered Web server brought a rare smile to the faces of our accounting gnomes. Imagine the possibilities, they squeaked.

After all, the science is perfectly sound, and there are already other potato-powered products on the market.

But would we really save? Spudserver is a stripped-down 386 running Linux (of course). Its builders report that satisfactory performance takes at least a dozen potatoes - even after they stripped out the PC's hard drive and fan.

What would it take to power a Sun Enterprise server with a hard drive the size of Rhode Island? How many trips a week would our IT department have to make to the local supermarket to pick up potatoes?

But all is not lost. Imagine combining potato power with Stanford's matchbox-sized Web server or even the University of Massachusetts' nickel-size server.

One of our Potato Heads is missing

Speaking of potatoes and Rhode Island, did you know the state has erected dozens of six-foot-tall Mr. Potato Heads? Better make plans now to visit the Ocean State, though. Vandals have been breaking off pieces of the giant spudsters. In one case, they even carted away an entire giant Mr. Potato Head.

Washing his mouth out with SOAP?

First Kerberos, now SOAP? The Register reports that Microsoft sent its lawyers after a former Microsoft contractor who was about to give a talk about the supposedly open XML-based RPC system. They warned him to watch his mouth. The news comes only a couple weeks after Microsoft went after Slashdot for posting details of its version of the supposedly open Kerberos standard.

5/22/00

Fighting like a girl

You'll have to excuse me if I seem a bit distracted today. I just got back from a fight on the playground with some of the other girls and, well, I didn't do too well - I got my face all scratched up. Even cowering in a corner didn't help.

Girls? Yes, the girls of Sissyfight 2000.

It's today's doozy of a time waster, combining state-of-the-art technology (hey, interactive Shockwave!) with the allure of a pre-teen catfight.

Once you create a free account, you go onto the playground of one of three schools. When enough girls congregate (from three to six), the fight is on.

Fights consist of timed rounds in which you can scratch or grab another girl, cower, suck on your lollipop or tattle on everyone. A chat function lets you gang up on another girl (caution: the chat is public).

When the time for each round is up, the computer compares everybody's moves (scratching beats grabbing, but cowering is a good defense against scratching), then awards or subtracts points. The match ends when the first girl either runs away or has all her points taken away.

It's all far more addictive than it should be. People are starting to complain. I just tell 'em to meet me on the playground so we can settle this like, um, girls.

That girl

OK, I'll bite: Who is the woman on this Cisco page and why is the company putting up inane test pages where sites such as Need to Know might find them?

When open source doesn't work?

This Web site runs on Apache. We've got Linux servers on our internal net. Sometimes it's easy to think we could ditch most of our proprietary software (read: Microsoft, Oracle and Sun) and just run a bunch of free apps.

For instance, MySQL. However, before you move your databases over to this application, take a look at Why Not MySQL? by the OpenACS Project. The group is building an open-source Web tool kit based on AOLserver, which has a built-in Tcl interpreter, and PostgreSQL. Main objection: the desire for speed means MySQL doesn't do a perfect job ensuring data integrity.

The report includes objections from MySQL supporters.