Unix diapers
Yep, Unix is a registered trademark of the Open Group, which means, I suppose, I should be referring to Unix-brand operating system (in an earlier reporting life, I was forever running afoul of Velcro Industries, which kept reminding me their product is Velcro-brand hook-and-loop fastener; I finally got the message).
But the cat's out of the bag, so to speak: There are quite a few products outside the U.S. with Unix in their names that have nothing at all to do with computing, according to a Bell Labs report. Among them:
Unix diapers
Unix brand food containers
Unix fire extinguishers
Unix pens
Unix anti-fungal products for wheat and barley
Via Kuro5hin.
A beautiful waste of time
Feed calms the savage Web beast. Give this Java applet a URL and it deconstructs it - and then any links from that URL - into a series of ever-changing images and color charts that are surprisingly soothing, not to mention addictive:
FEED consumes the web. A play on the technical term "data feed", FEED does not supply information, it consumes information, reducing structure, meaning and content to a stream of text and pixels. An anti-browser, FEED unravels the web. Contemplative and meditative where the web is commercial and raucous, homogeneous where the web is varied, visual where the web is textual, FEED strips away the distracting veneer of content in an automated, machine driven search for the underlying beauty of the web.
Via Memepool.
06/21/01
A P2P taxonomy
You remember Dan Bricklin. Co-daddy of VisiCalc and all that. Of late, he's become very intrigued with peer-to-peer computing. In this paper, he tries to come to grips with a key problem facing P2P: Nobody can define what exactly it is.
We all know that P2P relates to some sort of topographical difference in using computers and networks compared to what was common in the near past. What we struggle with is "what is that difference?" What I think is that people want to think that there is one new topology and that's what's happening. I think we're confused because all sorts of things, each of which has merit, claim to be "Peer-to-Peer", yet they all are different in many fundamental ways. They all use multiple PCs, which we think of as "Peers", connected by the Internet "to" something, so they each can lay claim to that moniker.
Let me propose some taxonomy that describes the topologies and roles of computers in a network, and then let's examine the taxonomy of various systems, such as Napster, Instant Messaging, and Groove, in light of that taxonomy.
This page is too stupid
Now this is the sort of error page Microsoft should put in Internet Explorer.
Via Memepool.
06/20/01
Homeless dot-commer bogus?
Was that story about Silicon Valley dot-commers reduced to living in a homeless shelter too good to be true?
Salon reports that a key figure in that recent AP story may not be homeless - just, um, different.
Sacrosante didn't return calls for comment, but several of his former colleagues argue that Sacrosante is no symbol of the dot-com boom gone bad, he's just a quirky programmer -- one with a penchant for drifting in and out of jobs and cities on a moment's notice.
Long before he ended up homeless, Sacrosante made impulsive decisions, Griffin and others say. His five-page résumé, faxed by Griffin, reveals that he had at least 11 jobs after leaving the Army in 1985, many of them for less than a year. Sacrosante ended up in California after hastily leaving Phoenix, says Rick Beach of Yo Consulting, the firm that placed Sacrosante at Garrett. He took off in January, and didn't leave a forwarding address.
Whee, Linux is fun!
Open-source doyen Eric S. Raymond has managed to turn Linux kernel configuration into a text adventure game.
Via Fark
06/19/01
Blue Screens everywhere
BSODs aren't just for desktops, anymore. Daimyo.org's BSOD page shows the infamous screens on everything from Jumbotrons to airport terminal displays (along with the classic three-button Microsoft keyboard).
Via Boing Boing.
Forget viruses: This fungus eats CDs
Yes, it's Yet Another Thing to Worry About. The London Telegraph reports researchers have found a fungus in Belize that destroys CDs:
Victor Cardenes, of Spain's leading scientific research body, stumbled across the microscopic creature two years ago, while visiting Belize. Friends complained that in the hot and sticky Central American climate, a CD had stopped working and had developed an odd discoloration that left parts of it virtually transparent.
Dr Cardenes and colleagues at the Superior Council for Scientific Research in Madrid discovered a fungus was steadily eating through the supposedly indestructible disc. The fungus had burrowed into the CD from the outer edge, then devoured the thin aluminium layer and some of the data-storing polycarbonate resin.
06/18/01
Microsoft revises Smart Tags a bit
Robert Scoble, who has been writing a fair amount about Microsoft's Smart Tags, says he's gotten e-mail from a Microsoft developer that claims Microsoft was shocked, shocked, by the outrage over the new IE6 feature. In response, the message says, Microsoft will ship IE 6 with Smart Tags turned off and won't let users override a meta tag that lets a Web site keep Smart Tags off its pages.
Kinda cool, if you care about this sort of thing, but it raises some larger Web issues. Microsoft is basically making Web designers re-do all their pages if they want to block Smart Tags, by embedding a new meta tag (there's something similar with a new system for downloading images). Why not reverse it - assume Web sites don't want Smart Tags unless it's explicitly requested in a meta tag?
Yeah, yeah, that flies in the face of progress and the American way and all, I know, I know.
Homeless dot-commers
Perhaps you've already read the AP story about the Silicon Valley dot-commers found living in a homeless shelter. Hmm, surely not all their remuneration during the bubble was in the form of stock options. What were they doing with all that money back then?
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Tracking down a stolen Mac; Dead C Scrolls; Googlewhacking; How bad is it in the Valley?; Storage lessons from the Wayback Machine; The pub-seeking handheld; Internet gang wars; Outlook XP breaks MIME.
Why should iMac owners have all the eye candy?; Luxo Redux; So you think your job is bad; Google as a DNS replacement? Not so fast; Nokia exec cites stock plunge in speeding-fine appeal; The tragedy of the .coms; The Google parlor game; Some people *like* Steve the Dell Guy; Ban all Microsoft attachments?
Dot-com to bare all; iMac Dance; Wendy's remembers Dave; Search engine bites the dust; Wendy's Web site ignores Dave's death; Geek comic strip; Youngest security expert ever; Spam poetry; Confessions of a hacker; Breathless Apple; Dave Barry does Windows XP.
Dropping everything to vote; The best Apple rumors, ever; Guess Steve Case isn't getting into Harvard; Make your own O'Reilly cover; Boosting your wireless juice; Telnet lives!
This space intentionally left blank (vacation).
The most useless software ever; Is Microsoft getting ready to squash PC vendors?; Excite@Home: The Watergate of the New Economy?; No more 3Com Park. Is CMGI Field next?; Are you an e-bore?; This site'll have you coming and going; Entertainment Weekly's loss of innocence; Ensign Crusher as Entertainer of the Year; Oh, for the old days.
The Museum of Broken Packets; Just in time for Thanksgiving; Tourist Guy found; Why virtual offices suck; A domain ruling that sucks; Hacking the iPod.
Why you shouldn't ship computers via UPS; When .Net requires Java; High-tech grafitti artists; Spam from beyond the grave; New group tries to oversee the whole Internet; Paging Dick Tracy; Students use PDAs to cheat; Windaz for Aussies, Newfies; Another alternative to Passport; A virtual honeynet
Bill Gates: Father of open source; Verizon exec: Monopoly is good; Weird molecule names; E-mail: too much of a good thing?; A cluster of one; More woes for dot-bombers; Spam as weapon in the war on crime; Just when you think the Web can't get any better; Just when you think the Web can't get any worse; More proof I shouldn't be a wiseass; Using your Web logs to ID hacker attacks; Help save the FAQs; Who do you trust, baby?; Powerpuff Girls powerless against virus; Big IP pipe between US, Europe.
The profit of turning thugs into programmers; Work Name Generator; A programmer's lament; The world's best ATM; Are anti-spammers killing people?; Web services and storage; Get your Aerons here; Perl for the XXI-imum century; Microsoft's blocking of non-IE browsers.
Government info taken off the Web since 9/11; Beware hackers who talk too much; A contest you can enter sitting down; Now don't try this in the office; Bob Patterson must die; Finally, a useful 404 page; Tech calls from hell; Teletubbies XP; More XP fun; Anthrax and e-mail; Larry's ID card; World's longest gum-wrapper chain.
Let's drop PDAs on Afghanistan; Voice control? Try grunt control; Spam gets back to business; A content-management portal; Share your system tray with the world; Would you let the recording industry onto your network?; Al Queda's low-tech high tech; 9/11 archive; Shoe company gets open source after all; Pod people, coming soon to a cube near you.
Larry and Scott's dueling ID cards; Cringely: Broadband is dead; The dangers of Photoshop; The dangers of copy protection; Microsoft mining whois for telephone solicitations?; How to REALLY throw a LAN party; Good fences don't make good 'Net neighbors; How Google adapted to 9/11 news; Web services as over-hyped hooey; Why shoe guys shouldn't do open source; Online air hockey.
AT&T waives 9/11 wireless charges for some; Shifting gears; Craig Burton on the Novell/Microsoft suit; In search of the post-PC interface; Vibrating PDAs and wearable phones; Gary Condit's Web site; No, that isn't a real photo of a WTC tourist; How to throw a LAN party; How sucky is your intranet?
For grizzled 'Net veterans; UK ISP forced to pull deceptive ads; Pretty Good encryption controversy; Are you as smart as Miss America?; Really securing your computer; Still lots of insecure IIS servers; Kids, don't try this at home; Anthrax Kills; Larry's national database; Nimda hysteria?
Attack and post-attack items.
999,999,999 bottles of beer on the wall; Finally, a wind-up cell phone; Enough with the ringing!; The VoIP calculator; 802.11b insecurity; Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf explains IOS DHCP; Is ENUM the mark of the devil?; AOL gives user permanent demerit; The Ballmer music video; Cleveland news flash: Y2K was last year.
Re-routing around censorship; Us vs. them in scripting; The boss button; Fighting off the hackers for fun; Peer computing as a weapon of war; Unix poetry; The Windows Fatal Exception Decoder; New Fusion widget: Getting rid of spyware; The sound of 200 cell phones going off at once; Taleban Web site hacked; Hey, sysadmin, remember Sircam?
On the importance of flame wars; Bill Gates sees dead people?; A markup language for grunts and groans; Is Microsoft leaking those Ballmer dance videos?; Good Samaritan not so good?; Steve Ballmer works up a sweat; Open-source wireless cracking; When technology goes too far; Another dumb computer arrest?; Is Cisco Communist?
Moron marketers threaten 'Net users; Finding free wireless access; Complete wastes of time; OS holy war flares in North Carolina; Are programmers weird?; Somebody actually buys an X10 camera; We're number, uh, two!; Those after-hours computer discussions; An entire city running on Linux; Distributed spam fighter under development; Could a Warhol virus infect the entire 'Net in 15 minutes?; Tell AOL what to do with its CDs.
Fusion shatters a myth; Bridging .Net and Java?; AT&T Broadband cuts off non-IIS servers to fight Code Red; Bluetoothless; Tennessee town bites into Apple; And you thought TI-99/4A fans were over the edge; Biometrics coming to your local supermarket; Steve Ballmer a-hootin' and a-hollerin'; Speaking of Web images; Just how far PC prices have fallen; Does Starbucks' CEO get his own wireless strategy?
Crackers getting more sophisticated; Sex and Microsoft Office; The wonders of science, part MXXII; Finally, a useful virus; A shocking game controller; Big Ball of Mud school of programming; Two vitally important new resources; Adobe: Ooops; Eudora Welty, dead at 92; Centralizing Unix administration in Perl; Spellchecking the entire Web.
Worm turns on Microsoft Web servers; The day the ISP died; Cell-phone users have no shame; Even Internet consultants can screw up the 'Net; Symphony for Dot Matrix Printers; The ultimate cup of coffee; The solar-powered ISP; Everhost; Internet VCer: Oops; The Lego Palm and the pink fuzzy laptop; The Microsoft-English dictionary; Putting a loved one in the home.
Saving those all important VoIP calls; This site is a bright idea; Could wireless end messy divorces?; How much will that software really cost you?; Ghosts of failed dot-coms; The spy's guide to securing your Cisco routers; Oprah for Internet czarina?; What's Microsoft doing at an open-source conference?; Like a big pizza pi; Cyber-bullies; Better check your phone bill; Have some birthday pi.
How HP wastes energy to save energy; New toy for the bored and lonely; Weird programming languages; When sponsors are speakers; The case of the disturbing backwards monitor; Congress to ICANN: Drop dead; Yet another video game made into a movie; Smile, you're on Candid (Police) Camera; High-speed hotels; Network Solutions blocking name transfers?
One of the fathers of Usenet dead at 45; Are you ready for insta-spam?; Diary of a site collapse; Skirting the issue; Assimiliating the Web; Trolling for help; Software wars; Rating the rater; True tales from the help desk; How about spam embedded in your mail?
Unix diapers; A beautiful waste of time; A P2P taxonomy; This page is too stupid; Homeless dot-commer bogus?; Whee, Linux is fun!; Blue Screens everywhere; Forget viruses: This fungus eats CDs; Microsoft revises Smart Tags a bit; Homeless dot-commers.
Slashdot crashes the NSA; They may be Smart Tags, but they're not Original Tags; What open source and California wines have in common; Jakob Nielsen no tyro; How to make Windows 2000 really, really secure; Where the Internet begins; A useful computer bug; The clothes make the geek; The end of the Internet; Why PDF bites; Novel use of a wireless phone; Hidden info; When Web sites tell too much.
DSL modems are so '90s; Bye-bye Netscape; Get ready to upgrade those mail servers; The anti-.Net; The real reason to buy a Palm; Anatomy of a DDoS attack; Pain is good.
