rc3.org

Strong opinions, weakly held

Month: November 1999 (page 1 of 10)

Would you pay a million bucks for someone to come up with a name as stupid as Agilent? I hope not. Ruth Shalit blows this whole self-parodying “industry” wide open in Salon today. One wonders how people so absurd could take themselves so seriously.

My current favorite snack: olive oil potato chips. I like the black pepper variety, but Whole Foods doesn’t have them in their online catalog.

I’m looking for a concise explanation of how Internet email works. RFC 821 and RFC 822 are nice, but I’m looking for something a bit more basic. Please send email if you can help me out. (You would think that the Internet Mail Consortium would provide this information, but they don’t seem to.)

Despite the fact that it uses an unwieldy frames-based layout, the Internet FAQ Consortium is still a great resource for finding Usenet FAQs and other useful reference information.

Lovers of computer science history and nostalgia will find the story of John Lions and his banned set of books on the original Unix source code fasciniting. His comments on the source code, reprinted in 1996, are available at Amazon.com under the title Lions’ Commentary on Unix : With Source Code.

I try to avoid the meta stuff as much as possible, but I’d like to send my best wishes to Jesse James Garrett, who has put his uniformly excellent weblog on indefinite hiatus. Good luck, Jesse.

Today’s New York Times has an article about the elimination of distinction from the top level domains. Back before most Internet users remember, it actually meant something to be a .com, .org, or .net. These days, people just take what’s available. In fact, Network Solutions helpfully suggests registering your domain names in all three TLDs if they’re not taken. At least they aren’t selling domain names in .edu, .mil, and .gov to anyone who wanders by, although the Republicans did try to pull some shenanigans with a .gov domain name not long ago. (If anyone has a pointer to the gop.gov story I’m referring to, please email it to me.)

Today marks the return of Scott Suger at Slate’s Today’s Papers. He’d been gone for quite some time, and I was afraid he’d taken another job. No offense to Michael Brus and the other people who filled in, but Shuger is the man.

The Washington Post is a few months late with their story on the the now infamous gwbush.com Web site. Even so, this story gives me so many reasons to laugh that I feel compelled to link to this old news. I still can’t get over the fact that Bush’s staffers registered tons of disparaging domain names like bushsucks.com, and then forwarded them all to the official campaign Web site.

A bunch of lawyers have used the Findings of Fact as a launching pad for filing class action suits against Microsoft. I’m not sure how I feel about this. I do think that Microsoft has harmed the computer industry, and thus has harmed consumers, but I don’t think that they’ve done that harm by overcharging consumers for Windows.

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