My high-school best friend and I both ended up in Virginia in the very early nineties, a few years after we graduated, he in the Air Force and I going to tech school. We decided to make a trip back to Connecticut to meet up with the old gang. Among the people we met were [...]
Archive of posts filed under the Internet category.
“AOL sales drop by a quarter, reports billion dollar loss”
Before the Internet became widespread, AOL made money by charging ridiculously high rates to access the content on their network. Afterwards, their content was worth less every day as web sites sprang up everywhere, so they reinvented themselves as an Internet Service Provider (a pretty slick move, in my opinion, not that they had a [...]
“Movie, tech giants prep universal online media store”
It’s a good concept, but is it going to catch on? [...] the question remains, will consumers care about not possessing the files? There are clear advantages in not doing so: you don’t need buckets of local storage, and you don’t have to fear losing your collection to burglars or housefires. There are clear advantages [...]
Spin
I never realized, until I started reading the Bad Science blog, just how much “spin” there is in science papers. Spin is great when shooting pool, but it’s simply dishonest when someone uses it in a scientific paper. And when that paper is about the efficacy of a medicine or the safety of a product, [...]
“Canadian man replaces his false eye with bionic camera eye, is putting eye video feed online for all to see”
This is the sort of thing I expect will become commonplace, as replacement body parts become a lot less expensive. (I’d love to claim credit for the prediction, but I’ve seen it before, in science fiction novels from at least two authors. One was William Gibson, the other I can’t recall the name of.)
“Use Wolfram Alpha to Figure Out Confusing Family Relationships”
In my family, I’m likely to actually need this. And maybe a score-card too. DARK HELMET: Before you die, there is something you should know about us, Lone Starr. LONE STARR: What? DARK HELMET: I am your father’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s former room-mate. LONE STARR: What’s that make us? DARK HELMET: Absolutely nothing. Which is [...]
“Winds howl through the deserted moonscape behind Rupert Murdoch’s UK newspaper paywalls”
If newspapers are relying on paywalls to survive, then they really are the equivalent of walking dead men. Even more so than those of us who have watched this saga from the beginning realized. As this article points out, there’s no point to putting the papers online if only subscribers can see them or link [...]
“Firefox tool erases Justin Bieber from Web”
Official censorship is bad, but people censoring what they’ll see on their own systems… I can live with that. I love the name too.
RSS Feed Ads
I’ve been pained for several years by the ads in one of my RSS feeds. Mozilla Thunderbird (my program of choice for handling e-mail and RSS feeds) waits until it has all of the images for a message before rendering any of the message, including its text. That’s fine, I don’t mind text or non-animated [...]