If you don’t C-sharp, you’ll B-flat.
“TCP is broken”
Chris Linfoot explains how and why the networking protocol behind the entire Internet (TCP/IP) is broken, by design. Interesting, though fairly technical.
Steve Jobs == Bill Gates Junior?
Bill Gates’ Microsoft, long hated by the technorati for its aggressive pushing of inferior technologies, its arrogant attitude toward the standards used by the rest of the industry, the secrecy that it cloaks its own proprietary ways of doing things in (so that no one can interoperate with its products), and its paranoid and monopolistic way of murdering anything that it deems as potential competition, has an apprentice now: Steve Jobs’ Apple.
Ever since the iPod took the MP3-player world by storm, I’ve noticed that Apple has borrowed more and more heavily from Microsoft’s playbook. With that in mind, its latest move, pushing its Safari browser on anyone using iTunes or QuickTime, seems perfectly in character.
Until recently, Apple was seen by many as the computer world’s savior from Microsoft… but maybe we need to be saved from Apple too. Thank goodness that Linux is finally maturing into a decent desktop OS.
“Comcast: FCC lacks any authority to act on P2P blocking”
Comcast, the ISP-slash-cable company that has been in hot water for the past year for “managing” (i.e. blocking) P2P applications, has thrown down the gauntlet to the FCC. After eight months of denying that they were doing it at all, now they’re basically saying “yeah, we’re doing it, and you can’t stop us. Nyah, nyah!“
If an ISP cannot be legally forced to allow all network traffic through, that opens the door to any ISP arbitrarily blocking any content that they wish — services that interfere with their own offerings, services that compete with a partner’s offerings, even services that someone there just plain doesn’t like. It would change the Internet greatly, and not in a good way.
Fortunately, it looks like Comcast is on legally shaky ground. Let’s hope the courts agree, when (not if) it gets that far.
Test
Test post, seems to be some trouble on the server.
Update: Apparently this version of WordPress has a problem with the letters CC followed immediately by a colon. Every time I tried to publish the next post (with the letters “FCC” followed by a colon), it told me that the post was “not acceptable.” I had to change my sentence structure to avoid the colon in order to get it published.
That’s probably a security thing, to ensure that e-mail addresses aren’t posted or something, but it sure made for a few interesting minutes while I tried to figure out whether my blog had been hacked. 🙂
“Martian Headsets”
Joel Spolsky has hit the nail right on the head, yet again. This time, he’s talking about Internet Explorer 8 and the decision whether or not to automatically follow web standards, and the eternal flame wars that are going to erupt over it. He also points out that this is the same reason that Windows Vista has gotten such a lukewarm response in the market (I don’t think it’s the entire reason, but it’s certainly part of it). It’s worth a read.
“Bigger Computer Monitors = More Productivity”
The Wall Street Journal confirms what most people have suspected for a long time: size does matter.
Blog Changes
Those of you keeping track may have noticed that I’ve tried, since starting this blog, to post at least one entry a day. You may also have noticed a few gaps recently. Those don’t indicate a lack of enthusiasm on my part, just a lack of time: I’ve gotten very busy with Project X recently, and I presently don’t have the time to peruse the web for interesting tidbits like I used to. So I’m abandoning that format, at least temporarily, and will just post when I find something I think is interesting. We’ll see how it goes.
“War against Web tops music biz ‘screw-ups’ list”…
…as anyone living in the last decade with two eyes and a brain could have told you.
French military victories?
I don’t know a lot about history, but if you go to Google.com at the moment, type in French Military Victories, and hit the “I’m feeling lucky” button, you get a fake Google page (yes, it looks real, but it isn’t — look at the address bar) with this text:
Did you mean: french military defeats No standard web pages containing all your search terms were found. Your search – french military victories – did not match any documents. Suggestions: – Make sure all words are spelled correctly. – Try different keywords. – Try more general keywords. – Try fewer keywords. Also, you can try Google Answers for expert help with your search.
Even worse, following the “suggested” link gives you a page (at the same site) titled “The Complete Military History of France” with a (very heavily biased) military history of the country to back up its point.
Somebody seems to have a grudge against the French.
Frankly, I prefer the miserable failure Googlebomb, which Google defused that more than a year ago, but this one managed to get some attention — I heard about it from Christopher Linfoot’s blog.