Current Cringley column (was at
http://www.infoworld.com/pageone/opinions/rcringe.htm
but I guess it has since moved?):
> I never cease to be amazed at the logic of some readers. After
> mentioning -- and having my editor delete the location of -- a DLL that
> could unlock the time trial on the $5 Kinko's version of Office 97, my
> e-mail box has been flooded with messages cajoling me to "do a special
> favor" for "research purposes only, of course" and "understanding why
> you wouldn't want to publicly print it" and "please e-mail me the
> location of the DLL."
Are people REALLY this stoopid?
Meanwhile, Bob Metcalfe goes nuts with a Star Wars analogy (at
http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayNew.pl?/metcalfe/metcalfe.htm
but no doubt that will change):
> A Long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, Ben "Obi-Wan Kenobi"
> Barker was an ARPA knight on the planet BBN Corp. Barker has now
> reappeared in the Texas desert as chief of the Data Race Inc. And we
> are relieved to learn that, unlike Cerf Vader, this ARPA knight has
> not been tragically turned to the telco side of the force.
>
> More than 300 Web generations ago, the ARPA knights launched the
> Internet rebellion against the Imperial Telco Empire. Today, Barker
> and his insignificant rebel band in San Antonio
> (http://www.datarace.com) are rising up against the Empire once
> again. The Data Race is penetrating the twisted-pair defenses of the
> Telco Empire's central office: the Death Star.
Um, there is such a thing as taking a metaphor too far, even when
referring to the oppressive telecommunications regime... although he
does get in a good one-liner:
> I'd probably be Jabba the Hut, because only he would think up e-postage.
And I have to admit, the technology sounds compelling.
> In short, Data Race's Be There (BT) Personal Multiplexor is a pair of
> exotic three-processor modems, one in your PC at home and the other in a
> remote-access server at your place of business. Software in your PC and
> its BT modem connect you through the Empire's plain old telephone
> service (POTS) to software in your company's BT server. The server, in
> turn, connects you to your company's PBX and LAN.
>
> With BT (not to be confused with British Telecommunications, soon to be
> confused with MCI), it's just like being there back in your office,
> receiving voice and fax calls exactly as if your home PC were an
> extension of your office phone system. And you can simultaneously be
> connected through your BT modems to your office LAN and the
> Internet. All for a cost of $500 per PC modem card and $15,200 per
> eight-port server.
>
> ...
>
> This would allow your home and office or your home and an Internet
> service provider, to be connected all the time, without the rigmarole
> of touch-tone dialing, at much higher speeds, at much less cost,
> without tying up the 121-year-old Empire's obsolete but undepreciated
> circuit-switching apparatus.
>
> The Federal Communications Commission, intending to implement the
> Telecommunications Act of 1996, issued regulations giving rebels
> throughout the Empire access to local wiring in all Death Stars.
Yes! Yes! Let's blow it up!!! Destroy! Destroy! Destroy!
> The Empire has for now repelled this attack on its Death Stars by
> appealing to the Supreme Court. There, Imperial stormlawyers will be
> light-sabering the Act and the FCC for years to come. In the very long
> meantime, you can "be there" by uniting with Barker and his Data Race.
I'm with them. Moving onto "The Last Word" (er, like,
http://www.pcweek.com/opinion/0303/03last.html
or something), we get a snippet on eCommerce:
> In my Feb. 10 column, when I mentioned that I thought iCat
> (www.icat.com) had done a credible job at rethinking how an electronic
> commerce app should act, I got an E-mailbag full from folks ready,
> willing and able to offer their advice. A couple of sites that turned up
> and were really worth checking out were those of Virtual Spin
> (www.virtualspin.com) and Ironside Technologies (www.ironside.com).
>
> I'll be interested to see what this week's E-mailbag turns up.
> During a recent weekend in Seattle, I had a chance to catch up
> with the folks at Design Intelligence. If you haven't heard of it,
> that's OK, because it is just now releasing its first product, ipublish
> (at www.design-intelligence.com). If ipublish is able to deliver on
> its promise, I'll put Design Intelligence right up there with
> NetObjects (www.netobjects.com) as folks who have really thought
> out a publishing process, rather than being engaged in the already
> crowded race of simply spewing up HTML pages and calling it a
> Web publishing program.
Folks who have really thought out a publishing process? "I'll take
FAMOUS THREE PERCENTERS for $500, Alex..."
> The first ipublish product allows for fairly instant and painless
> conversion of a document from one headed for print publishing to one
> headed for a presentation, or again redirected to a series of linked
> HTML pages. You're not going to find many (any?) other applications
> around that allow you to sling around a file quite so easily and have it
> actually come out as you'd intended. The engine is based on the
> company's proprietary Intelligence Automation technology, which is
> really very cool, although I am usually very wary of any product that
> has the "intelligence" moniker stuck on.
This sounds so cool. It's like the definition of cool.
> The company is trying to bring to the party a lot of features that have
> been part of desktop publishing but have been difficult to easily
> translate to the Web. Often the only choice has been to preserve the
> desktop page in an unchangeable form (Acrobat), or strip out the
> elements and recast them for the Web or for a presentation. Anyone who
> has struggled with file format conversions and the intricacies of text
> wrapping knows that it ain't as easy as the final result appears. If
> Design Intelligence can deliver on the promise of the ipublish beta
> version that I saw, it has a product that other vendors will be chasing
> for a while.
Buy! Buy! Buy!!!
While we're on a roll, Taligent lives (and this is HOT
http://192.216.48.63/cgi-bin/displayStory.pl?/features/970303appleibm.htm
but Rohit already FoRKed this...)
Moving right along, WebTV isn't dead yet (or so sayeth the shepherd
http://www.pcweek.com/news/0303/03mwebtv.html
so sayeth the flock):
> Purchasers of WebTV devices, manufactured by partners Sony Corp. and
> Philips Electronics Corp., mirror U.S. households in terms of PC
> ownership. About 65 percent of WebTV owners don't have PCs, compared to
> 61 percent of all U.S. households. Perlman didn't release figures on how
> many of the devices had been sold, but hinted that the number was well
> above 50,000.
>
> ...
>
> The other thing he thinks will attract mainstream users to Internet
> devices is low cost, comparing the device, which costs about $300, to
> the new sub-$1,000 PCs recently introduced by Compaq Computer Corp. and
> Hewlett-Packard Co.
>
> "[$999] is a lot of money to most people, especially if you're not sure
> what the value is," he said. "We know what a VCR does, but what is the
> Internet for?"
>
> WebTV customers appear to be using the Internet for getting their E-mail
> and surfing--primarily at consumer sites such as barbie.com and
> hotwheels.com, where Perlman said the WebTV domain is Nos. 4 and 5,
> respectively, in the list of domains accessing the site.
>
> And at EOnline, the Web site for the E! television network, WebTV was
> the No. 4 domain name that accessed the site in January, Perlman said.
>
> And they're not going to these sites alone. Average viewership is 2.5
> people, "just like TV," Perlman said.
>
> "For those of you who are advertiser-supported, that's good news," he
> added, saying that companies could conceivably charge more for banner
> ads that run on WebTV sites, since more people are watching the screen.
And then there was the mouse that roared...
http://192.216.48.63/cgi-bin/displayStory.pl?97033.ethink.htm
Another of Selker's inventions is a multistream input mouse, a
standard mouse with an IBM TrackPoint mouse positioned between its
left and right mouse buttons.
We end with the VERY misinformed
http://www.pcweek.com/news/0303/03proto.html
claiming that the Net protocol duo is on upgrade path...
Judge for yourself...
> Two core Internet protocols are receiving face-lifts to improve
> intranet application performance and management.
>
> Version 1.1 of HTTP, due to emerge as a formal draft specification by
> early summer, promises to radically cut connection and transmission
> times by adding pipelining and caching features, said Jim Gettys, one of
> HTTP's co-creators at the World Wide Web Consortium, in Cambridge, Mass.
>
> Meanwhile, under a separate initiative, the Internet Engineering Task
> Force this spring will call for comments on recommendations for fixing
> bugs and creating an extensibility model for NNTP (Network News
> Transport Protocol), a 13-year-old Usenet standard that is gaining
> acceptance as an intranet collaboration platform.
>
> The two upgrades will go a long way to restoring Web performance,
> which has suffered mightily under the weight of millions of new users.
>
> "It is encouraging to see that HTTP 1.1 is not going to be a
> technology only," said Jennifer Fletcher, an IS manager at Greenseller
> Associates, a New York accounting firm. "It is already making its way
> into actual products that I can use."
>
> Netscape Communications Corp., Microsoft Corp., IBM and JavaSoft will
> support HTTP 1.1 in its browsers and servers this year. To gain the
> full benefits of the upgraded protocol, both browser and server must
> speak HTTP 1.1.
>
> Pipelining will enable compliant browsers and servers to transfer all
> data in a single session, said Gettys, resulting in fewer total packets
> transferred in less time.
>
> Pipelining also will let more information be included in a single
> packet, enabling more packets to fit in a single network connection
> and reducing overall traffic through a router, he said.
>
> Caching, a limited feature in HTTP 1.0, has been improved in 1.1,
> said Gettys. With HTTP 1.1, a browser will be able to communicate
> with a server to compare page changes against a cached copy of
> a page. As a result, only the changes are sent to the user vs. the
> entire Web page.
>
> The issue with NNTP is not speed but extensibility, and standards
> bodies are working to create a way to extend the protocol, said
> Jack De Winter, a member of the NNTPext working group and lead
> programmer at WildBear Consulting, in Kitchener, Ontario.
>
> Already, several proposed extensions to NNTP are finding their
> way into products. Netscape has incorporated two extensions into
> Collabra Server that enable simplified naming schemes for
> newsgroups and an easier method of searching newsgroups for
> specific information.
Misinformed populist smurgen...
----
adam@cs.caltech.edu
After careful analysis I have developed a sophisticated theory to
explain the existence of this bizarre workplace behavior: People are
idiots.
-- Scott Adams