The Internet - a Definition

“A most ingenious innovation, like…the greatest library in the world, yet accessible from your desk, yet also current matters, a newspaper, a gazette, a…”

Christopher Nuttall 

in There'll Always Be An England Part II

Computers Without GUI

"...inscrutable machines used only by engineers and insurance statisticians"

Anonymous (or Timbo?)

 describing computers  before GUI in a comment at

 The Killer Within - At Microsoft.

The Perils of Auto-Transcribing

After looking at some puzzles at the Wall Street Journal I clicked on the discussion above, Why Buffett Is Betting Big on Housing. The man above is talking about the housing market and made reference to [the] Case-Schiller [index] instead that got transcribed into Kaye Scholer. Kaye Scholer seems like weird stretch of a personal name until wiki revealed that they are a high level law firm. The problem seems to be that incomplete references that are understood by humans can confuse programs by the lack of  small words like [the] and [index].

The Killer Within - At Microsoft

The first time we met face-to-face, I thought, This guy looks like an operative for the N.K.V.D. (sic)

Paul Allen, quoted in  Microsoft’s Odd Couple

describing Steve Ballmer.

Interesting article about the early years of Microsoft by its co founder Paul Allen, Microsoft’s Odd Couple, linked from slashdot, Microsoft's 'Cannibalistic Culture'. I also read the Isaacson biography of Jobs recently. The major similarity between Jobs and Gates is that they are/were complete and total bastards willing to screw their friends/partners for just a little more money/power.  

Disclaimer: I use a PC.

Pirate Bay is Down

This story repeated at news sites, The Pirate Bay hit by DDoS attack, and nerd sites. The Pirate Bay Suffering Global Outage From Massive DDoS Attack.

I am reminded of a footer/quote I used to see;

More people support the KKK
Than the RIAA  

In 1953 World Wide Computing = 1 Commodore 64

Have just started reading Turing's Cathedral, by George Dyson. Tells about the development and growth of digital computing in the 1940s and 1950s. According to the book, in March 1953 OTL there were 53 kilobytes of high-speed random-access memory on the planet Earth. If you consider that the UTers brought a quantum leap more RAM alone with them in just one of their various devices, imagine the boost to digital computing ITTL. This timeline's 2011 should have computing capabilities we won't have for many years.

Otis R. Needleman in the AH.com thread

 United American Flight 817 2.0.

Is this Email Necessary? - Flowchart

During WWII railroads were militarized. At the same they were allowed to continued operating under existing management. The nationalization the British railway companies happened after not during WWII. Rail companies were placed in a ticklish spot, they were still private corporations, they didn't want to complete annoy the traveling public who were past and future customers. So advertising was done by both government and railways to discourage consumer traffic.

Here is a flowchart that discourages email. It is not that email is such a bad thing but because it so useful. But too much email is sometimes worse that no email at all.

 (Alex 9/29/2000)

Flow chart after the jump.

Steve Jobs in Hell

God Bless the Internet

It giveth and taketh away.

Ray Sullivan, West Wing S07E010

"What Is the Internet, Anyway?"

This was linked from the comment thread on Boingboing about some painfully out of touch comments from some flack from Hollywood, MPAA's number two admits industry "not comfortable" with the Internet. This mashup was produced by a a site called Urlesque. in the cooments at Urlesque blackbelt_jones mentions:

The thing that struck me as hilarious was "the internet yellow pages" Right in
the beginning, I paid about 20 dollars for that book. It seems like a joke now:
a search engine in book form!

A Swiss Supervillian Datacenter

An anonymous commenter on my blogpost last year, "A Super Villain's Datacenter", sent me a link to another super villain server farm, Mount10. This one is is located in the Alps. In one of the Chung Kuo novels a super villain went to ground at a secret base high in the Alps.

Report From the Ancient Internet

Science Friday on NPR had a rebroadcast of first program that they also simlubroadcast on the "internet", A Trip Back To The Future of The Internet. People called in during the program using their, for the time, bleeding edge internet telephony on $8K UNIX machines. In the middle of program after suffering through internet telephony problems like packet loss and the walkie talkie/half-duplex nature of such early systems, the host Ira Flatow gives this understatement.

It seems to me the Internet is in a very crude stage.

Dead Monitor

I wonder when I'll see flat screen monitors and flat screen TVs are abandoned on garbage day. Will CRTs be antiques then.

Life Without a Computer

Recently my computer was down and powerless. I felt powerless too, I had to regress technologically and do many in unusually and ancient ways.

I was forced to:

• get time from a clock
• read the newspaper on newsprint
• listen to radio on a radio
• watch TV on a TV
• play solitaire with cards

It was terrible.

Ancient Computer Graphics in Star Wars

slashdot has a link to an an old film explaining the computer graphics in the Star Wars briefing scene, 1977 Star Wars Computer Graphics. The Topless Robot found this gem and has this wonderful comment from Nonish on the terrible and declining taste of one George Lucas.

"Stick around. I'm sure Lucas is close to unveiling plans to refilm the classic trilogy.

Now with poop jokes and Jar Jar Binks™"

No. NO! Don't even go there. I've been scared pretty much shitless over this ever since this let's-refilm-and-gangrape-classics fad caught on at Hollywood.

Stupidity in Real Life and Online

In a slashdot article complaining about tech support, Easing the Job of Family Tech Support? Chapter80 gives this analogy for how easily people forget basic streetwise survival skills when online.

My usual approach is in the form of an analogy.

"You're driving down the road, and you stop at a traffic light. A man, dressed like a mechanic, approaches your car and says 'I think your car has a problem. Please pop the hood, and let me do a free analysis." Do you let him?"

"You get a package in the mail. You don't recognize the return address. You open it, and inside is a device with a note that says 'want a good laugh? press this button'. Do you press it?"

"A stranger walks up to you on the bus, and says 'My name is Rev. Kwame. I want a reliable person who could assist us to transfer the sum of Twenty Million Five Hundred Thousand United States Dollars ( $20,500,000 ) into his / her account.This fund resulted by way of gratification from a contract awarded by us under the budget allocation to my Ministry and this bill has been approved for payment by the concerned Ministries.' Do you give them your bank account number?"

Etc.

My Computer Is Alive, Again

Chicom Cybercrime and Western Stupidity

"the capitalists will sell us the rope to hang them."

VI Lenin on the often moral flexibility of businessmen.

They (Capitalist) will furnish which will serve to support of the Communist Party in their countries and, by supplying us materials and technical equipment which we lack, will restore our military industry, necessary for our future attack against our suppliers. To put it in other words, they will work for the preparation of their own suicide.

VI Lenin, fully footnoted quote in

Respectfully quoted: a dictionary of quotations.

We have already been suffered through one Cold War. Now because some short sighted stupidity of bottom feeders another Cold War, at least, is due. In today's Globe & Mail there are two competing stories about pleasures and pains of doing business in the territory currently controlled by the Chinese Communist Regime. In the hard news section is a scary story, Foreign journalists in China target of computer attack. In the aptly named business section of the Globe & Mail, ROB, is a more upbeat story of the China trade, Interac ABMs to accept Chinese debit cards.

Screens scrapes of both articles after the jump. The G&M only allows access to the old articles for a limited time.

Half Life With Real Guns

Waterloo Labs is a group from a laboratory near Austin Texas. They have figured out a (cheap) way to play Half Life with real guns. They are also able to kill zombies with shovels using the same setup. Check out the discussion of this technological break through at slashdot, Playing a First-Person Shooter Using Real Guns.

Ancient Computer Ad

Here is an ancient computer ad from 1990. This ad also gives many clues how the PC clones were able to win beta/vhs like computer format wars. The system being advertised are probably a 286 PC clone system that Amstrad had out at the the time. It was no great shakes even then. But as it was sold as a "business machine" it was being sold as turnkey manner. The peripherals, the software and training are included in one round and expensive price.