One of the fathers of Usenet dead at 45
Who knew? Back in 1979, Jim Ellis and Tom Truscott, a couple of grad students at Duke University, came up with a cool idea: Use the then new Unix-to-Unix Copy Protocol of Unix V7 UUCP abilities of Unix computers to create a discussion forum. Computers would dial up a neighbor at set times and exchange message bundles (initially over home-built 300-baud modems). That way, anybody with a dial-up connection (and the all important login) could post messages to the system.
Today, of course, this Unix Users Network is known as Usenet. Ellis died yesterday at 45 from non-Hodgkins Lymphoma.
Here is some more Usenet history.
Are you ready for insta-spam?
Anybody remember push technology? PointCast, anyone?
Like a bad penny, it's baaack.
Only this time, it'll be coming through your instant-messaging client. A bunch of companies are working out systems to send ads, um, and, oh, yeah, Opinion via AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ, etc. So according to Boing Boing, you'll soon need to watch out for spim - instant spam.
06/28/01
Diary of a site collapse
OK, it's a bit like slowing down for a car wreck (but who hasn't done that?). Still, there's plenty of interesting reading in Robin Miller's account of how Slashdot collapsed and then recovered this past weekend - and some tips on how to avoid similar problems at a complex Web site.
If something could go wrong, it did (from the networking staff that was unreachable because members were in the hospital or had cell phones with batteries that had fallen out to bizarre Cisco router configurations). With some massive amounts of time and key help from Cisco telephone support, the site came back up:
So he's in the switch and he's disgusted and horrified by how we have it configured, and I'm sure he's right. So I ask him, "Well, can you change all that?" I figure he'd say, "No, this your equipment, you fix it yourself," but he doesn't, he says, "Sure, what's the config password?" You gotta be kidding me, I must have dialed the wrong number here... this cannot be a tech support line... you can't actually get a tech support rep on a toll-free number simply to log in and fix your router setup while you whine at him on the phone... this is not real.
Skirting the issue
At first, Dale seems like your basic everyday programming guy:
I am one of UALR's two systems programmers in the Computing Services department. I try to keep the network and VAXen running, install software, write oddball programs, and answer lots of strange questions. I'm also starting to do some of the hardware things on the network.
But then you take a look at some of Dale's skirt pictures.
Via Fark.
06/28/01
Assimiliating the Web
Over on Salon, Scott Rosenberg looks at an Internet dominated - and fought over - by Microsoft and AOL Time Warner.
It's an interesting, if perhaps just a wee bit too Chicken-Little-ish look at the rapid consolidation of Web resources:
The Smart Tag controversy is a glimpse of what corporate speech control on the Net looks like -- that's why it has so much of the active Net up in arms. Meanwhile, the more AOL and Microsoft "leverage" their advantages in, respectively, subscribership and software, the more likely they are to start closing off entrances and exits and transforming their fiefdoms into private networks. In the world of instant messaging, each company's users are unable to connect with the other's -- a preview of what corporate control of access on the Net looks like. Think of how it would feel if e-mail worked that way!
In fact, it's not hard to imagine this at all -- because it's exactly how the commercial online world worked before 1994. The smoke of today's AOL/Microsoft war obscures a secret agenda the two companies will never admit to publicly: They don't like the Internet -- and never have.
Trolling for help
The Rumour Mill reports on a growing trend: companies hiring trolls to do outsourced programming. Just one problem: Don't send people from the home office out during feeding time.
We could only watch with horror from our Microsoft NetMeeting client, and listen to the screams and sound of crunching bones. We were horrified, as of course the cost of replacing this technician, and paying off his family, could almost negate the cost benefits of that particular project. We have to be soo careful, you know.
Via Fark.
06/26/01
Software wars
Andy Tai has a Hobbesian view of life, or at least, software. In his periodic Software Wars maps, he tries to show the software industry as one giant map of battle. The latest Software Wars map naturally shows the Empire of Microsoft both under attack and attacking on numerous fronts.
Via Kuro5hin, where one user says:
This map is a perfect symptom of what's wrong with the free software community: too many free software adherents seem to be more interested in fighting with Microsoft than they are in making great software that helps users.
Rating the rater
Jakob Nielsen, as you may know, is a Web usability consultant. Also, as you may know, he seems to attract more than his fair share of controversy, mainly from people who can't stand his approach to usability.
Using his own usability criteria, one critic gave his UseIt.com (Nielsen's own site) only a 75% rating:
The site scored well on compliance with basic standards, legibility and issues pertaining to users with disabilities. However, the site scored very poorly on organization and architecture. Information was difficult to identify and find, navigational support was flawed and minimal, and pages tended to be overly long, dense and lacking in internal hypertext navigation.
06/26/01
True tales from the help desk
Chronicles of George started out as a site with a simple mission: Chronicle the amazingly bad typos on the help-desk tickets of a guy on the front lines of a customer call center.
But the real fun is in the forums, where real, live help-desk workers complain about lusers, um, the rest of us:
Yesterday, I had TWO--count 'em, TWO--different lusers spill whole glasses of water on their laptops. And these are fairly NICE laptops, too--tricked out Thinkpad A20m's that we got a great deal on.
Both are completely dead. Will not power on, even after disassembly and drying.
Do these lusers get punished? Docked pay? Slapped on the wrist? Lectured about maintaining an ergonomically-centric work environment and keeping water and stuff AWAY from valuable electronics?
No.
Do I get chastised for my failure to resurrect these laptops from the dead?
Yes.
See, one of these laptops has (had) on it a presentation one of our directors was to be giving at a meeting later that day. Luser in charge of producing said presentation didn't have it backed up anywhere--not on floppy, not on the network, not even in rough form on paper or napkin
.
How about spam embedded in your mail?
Soon, you might be getting free or low-cost e-mail with spam right smack in the middle of it.
Admail lets e-mail providers slap an ad in the middle of all incoming messages. At first, I'm tempted to say "ugh," but then again, if you're using a free e-mail service, maybe you get what you pay for?
Via Kuro5hin.
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Compendium archive: Week of 01/21/02 Week of 01/14/02 Week of 01/07/02 Week of 01/02/02 Week of 12/03/01 Week of 11/26/01 Week of 11/19/01 Week of 11/12/01 Week of 11/05/01 Week of 10/29/01 Week of 10/22/01 Week of 10/15/01 Week of 10/08/01 Week of 10/01/01 Week of 9/24/01 Weeks of 9/10/01 - 9/17/01 Week of 9/3/01 Week of 8/27/01 Week of 8/20/01 Week of 8/13/01 Week of 8/6/01 Note: Compendium's entire staff took the week of 7/30 off. Week of 7/23/01 Week of 7/16/01 Week of 7/9/01 Week of 7/2/01 Week of 6/25/01 Week of 6/18/01 Week of 6/11/01 Week of 6/4/01
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.
