Al Macintyre: HisTech

Tue, 14 Jan 2003 19:33:40 GMT

http://www.spacewar.com/ has news about military stuff going into orbit and being prepared for future conflicts involving higher and higher military high tech

spy satellite development
Japan's unmanned spy plane
Advances in unmanned air vehicles such as robot helicopters
Missile Defense System ... Republican controlled US Gov is GO GO GO on this, before Democrats get control again and shoot it down again

Tue, 14 Jan 2003 19:10:34 GMT

http://www.astroexpo.com/about/gateway.asp discovered thanks to Moreover Science News right before my PC lockup lost me all my News Aggregation. This outfit appears to be a virtual exhibit hall of all space industries, with tons of technical references.

Tue, 14 Jan 2003 18:52:40 GMT

Julian Goh suggests we browse this site www.technewsworld.com which releases news every minute

Wed, 09 Oct 2002 20:41:04 GMT

Astronomy basis of Nobel Prize in Physics

[Discovery Channel News] via [Moreover - Science news] reports QUOTE

Physics Nobel to U.S., Japanese. Discovery Channel Oct 9 2002 0:33AM ET [Moreover - Science news]

Thu, 03 Oct 2002 05:34:12 GMT

Remember Longitude, the PBS special shown in America on A+E, based on the book by Dava Sobel? How about The Map that Changed the World by Simon Winchester? Well, to that collection add The Measure of All Things by Ken Alder, featured Inside Borders Oct 2002 edition, a book store chain recently arrived in Evansville Indiana, where I live, but undoubtedly a familiar chain name in many larger cities. What these 3 books have in common is that they help us understand the history of science by following along the struggles of the people who made the discoveries.

2 astronomers in the 1700'ds attempted to measure planet Earth, and their research led to our metric system, but apparently they made a mistake, and covered it up. What mistake? Aha, now you will have to read the book,

Tue, 01 Oct 2002 19:12:11 GMT

NZ scientists to put human genes in cattle. IOL Oct 1 2002 11:27AM ET [Moreover - Science news] QUOTE Wellington - New Zealand gave the go ahead on Tuesday to begin experiments that involve inserting human genes into cattle to produce proteins that could be used to treat medical conditions such as multiple sclerosis. UNQUOTE

Mon, 30 Sep 2002 18:10:19 GMT

Friday, I shared news of the Lindows PC selling at Walmart for $200.00 that uses Linux to provide all the services that people are accustomed to paying a whole lot more from Microsoft, except Microsoft sued to stop them from saying what their PC could do. Now comes AOL with a lawsuit and the comments on this article are also worth a review. Apparently the marketing about some relationship with AOL Netscape was merely clicking I Agree to AOL fine print when making a copy of the new AOL version of free Netscape browser. Thanks V. of TYR for passing on this link to me.

Fri, 27 Sep 2002 20:33:10 GMT

Gary Krakow of [MSNBC] reviews the $200.00 AOL Lindows PC, selling at Wal-Mart.com in which Gary labels this as a very promising work in process, in which it remains to be seen if the Linux community embraces this product that is in bed with AOL. The $200.00 price tag might be just right for people who want to experiment with what can be done outside the Microsoft world, but are not ready to experiment on their primary computer.

The product is on the bare-bones side, using a free version of Linux OS which they used to say did everything Microsoft Windows does and more, until Microsoft sued to make them stop saying that, but Microsoft was unable to stop them from providing more than Windows provides.
- Gary Krakow tested this assertion by installing his Microsoft Office 2000 onto Lindows 2.0 ... a PC that did NOT have any version of Microsoft Windows there, but Office 2000 ran flawlessly.
- Apparently many Microsoft products work fine, and some do not work properly, but hey that is just like the real Windows environment.
If you have not purchased a PC recently, this could be more than you now have.
- 800 Mhx C3 chip (Cyrix) Energy Star certified
- 128 Meg of Ram (expandable to 1 Gig)
- 10 Gig hard drive
- 52x CD-Rom
- 10/100 Ethernet connection (modem is $30.00 more)
- keyboard
- 2 button wheel mouse
- pair of speakers
For $100.00 more (price goes up from $199.86 to $299.--) you can get Microsoft Windows on it, but you do not need Microsoft Windows to do all AOL stuff, use the new Netscape, Instant Messaging, e-mail. Some tweaking required to make this more user-friendly.
For $99.00 per year you can download any additional software from the Lindows web site (1,300 titles offered) and for a limited time, that buys you and extra year of this.
- For example, Sun's StarOffice suite is a cheaper alternative to Microsoft Office, that normally retails for $75.00 so it is a great deal that is one of the 1,300 offerings.
Al thanks V. of TYR for bringing this story to my attention.

Thu, 26 Sep 2002 06:49:28 GMT

Safety of Nuclear Power Plants Again Questioned. VOA Sep 24 2002 9:33PM ET [Moreover - Science news]

We are living in a different world today. In recent years it made sense to

Build a nuclear power plant right next to a major city, because nothing serious likely to go wrong, but now power plants are potential terrorist targets, so we do not want them right next to major cities.
Build an airport in the middle of a major interstate interchange so easy to bring passengers real close to check in counters, but now a truck bomb can take out an airport, so we need a different kind of transportation infrastructure to unload the passengers from ground transport further away from the air tranport, and run everyone through screening suitably distant from buildings that might be major targets of terrorists.

VOA = Voice of America ... there's links here to what headlines VOA is sharing in various places in the world ... an interesting site worth revisiting occasionally.

Africa

Amnesty International protests torture of child prisoners in Burundi
Intervention in Ivory Coast
Uranium Security in Africa - is that an Oxymoron?

Asia - Pacific

China ultimatim to Iraq
North Korea gets special envoy from Pres Bush
a lot of stories I had not seen on local national news

Asia - South and Central

US Troops in Afghanistan discover another chilling al Quaida site.
Dutch and Germans to take over NATO command in Afghanistan when Turkey time runs out.
Iran nervous about US troops near their border with Afghanistan
Suicide terrorists seized an Indian temple, leading to another gunfight.
Terrorists attack a Christian Charity.

Americas

Argentina and Brazil economies still in bad shape
Chilean Appeals court throws out 7 cases against Pinochet
Colombian President visits USA President
Mexican Banker gets record bail
That storm in the Carribean

Middle East
- Britain and Iraq
- China and Iraq
- Kuwait hosts USA military exercises
- Lebanon scandal with Israel
- Palestinians
- USA politics and Iraq
- USA and Pakistan cooperation
USA
- Brushfire in Western USA
- Iraq and Partisan Politics
- Various legislation

Tue, 24 Sep 2002 20:26:36 GMT

[Davos Newbies Home] QUOTE

Brad DeLong has some interesting thoughts on why ancient Greece didn't have an industrial revolution. The comments are well worth following as well.

UNQUOTE [Davos Newbies Home]

Tue, 24 Sep 2002 09:18:52 GMT

[spacetoday.net] has links to several stories about various nations planned Mars expeditions

[spacetoday.net] QUOTEs

Energia proposes human Mars mission. Russian aerospace contractor RSC Energia has released plans for its proposed human mission to Mars,...

Japan confident Nozomi will be fixed. Officials with the Japanese space agency ISAS believe that the Mars-bound Nozomi spacecraft will...

UNQUOTEs [spacetoday.net]

Aerospace Daily reports on Russian proposed Human mission to Mars.

Astronomy.com reports that the Japanese Nozomi spacecraft will probably have the damage from the solar storm repaired, now that communications with it has been restored.

Tue, 24 Sep 2002 08:33:16 GMT

Yahoo Popular Science

Mon, 23 Sep 2002 16:28:25 GMT

[Boing Boing Blog] QUOTE Fuel cells by 2004. Good write-up of MTI Micro Fuel Cells, a tech start-up that is promising to ship a commercial fuel cell for personal electronics by 2004. I so want this technology -- laptops that run for days, PDAs that run for months. Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!) UNQUOTE [Boing Boing Blog]

From CNN Technology News

There is a huge market for micro fuel cells, small enough to be stuffed into a pocket.

MTI's first product will be a portable charger.
Later, when a fuel cell runs out, just snap in another, like batteries, except they run 10 times longer without needing recharging.

Cell phones freed of nightly recharges.
Laptops away from outlets.
Pocket TV.
Outdoors away from it all, but want to take a piece of civilization with you, like weather radio.

Sat, 21 Sep 2002 22:18:30 GMT

Impact of Emerging Technologies is the focus of [MIT Enterprise Technology Review] with this seemingly unbelievable story about an air powered automobile from France, using Isotherm Dynamics, a process that creates power by expanding air at an almost constant tempterature. If I am understanding this correctly:

Household electricity cools and compresses the air into a replaceable tank that goes in the car (it uses four such tanks) to run the 1 foot square engine, because ambient air temperature causes the air to expand ... this process takes 4 hours at home, per electric outlet being used for the purpose, or 3 minutes at a special compressed air station that Motor Development International sells for about $100,000.00 to places like today's Gas Stations. It can take in polluted air, filter it, and expel cleaner air as exhaust.
With fully loaded air tanks, it takes passengers about 120 miles at an average of 30 mph. The car can go from 0 to 50 mph in 7 seconds and seats 5.
An ABC reporter tested the car saying it ran quite well except it was quite noisy. The inventor says this is something they will fix in later models.
Buy this car for between $10k and $14k.

Thanks to V. of TYR for passing this link to Al Mac.

Fri, 20 Sep 2002 22:37:27 GMT

[Boing Boing Blog] QUOTE

Antihydrogen created at CERN. a Boing Boing reader sez: "The CERN lab in Europe has created REAL antimatter (antihydrogen atoms).The controlled production of antihydrogen observed in ATHENA is a great technological and scientific event. Even more so because ATHENA has produced antihydrogen in unexpectedly abundant quantities. Wow. Who wants a ride on the Enterprise?" Link Discuss UNQUOTE [Boing Boing Blog]

How fast can a vehicle go that is powered by Anti-Matter? Does Anti-Matter Fall Up?

Anti Gravity Research.
Here's how fast they can go in game simulations.

Is it safe to mix anti matter and regular matter to produce energy of thrust?
This sounds to me like the engine that propels itself using actual nuclear explosions (you have to have a pretty strong barrier plate to not get smashed up by this).

NASA's plans.
Wild Ideas.
More Questions.

Fri, 20 Sep 2002 17:10:31 GMT

Brian Dear (brian@platopeople.com) is working on a book about the history of the PLATO® system for computer-based education and training, and makes the following request at his site (http://www.platopeople.com/emoticons.html): QUOTE

~~~

"If you were involved with PLATO in any way, during the 60s, 70s, or 80s -- either as a courseware developer, an educator or faculty member, an engineer or system administrator, a student, a game player, whatever -- I would like to hear from you.

This book is the story of the people that were a part of that online community -- the first real online "virtual community", pre-Web, pre-AOL, pre-USENET, pre-BBS, pre-everything.

Were you a PLATO person? If yes, please help me make this book the most accurate and detailed account of the PLATO story as can be done.

This is your chance to help contribute to the oral history of PLATO."

~~~

He also has a page about PLATO emoticons which is fascinating:

"13 September 2002 -- The news is floating around the Web right now about the "discovery" of the first smiley. What readers and reporters are apparently not aware of is that the smiley being discussed is the first ASCII smiley.

Like so many things, PLATO was doing smileys years earlier. In fact, smileys on PLATO were already an art form by 1976. PLATO users began doing smiley characters probably as early as 1972 (when PLATO IV came out), but possibly even earlier on PLATO III (still to be determined... old-timer PLATO III users please speak up!).

How were these things done? Well, on PLATO, you could press SHIFT-space to move your cursor back one space -- and then if you typed another character, it would appear on top of the existing character. And if you wanted to get real fancy, you could use the MICRO and SUB and SUPER keys on a PLATO keyboard to move up and down one pixel or more -- in effect providing a HUGE array of possible emoticon characters. So if you typed "W" then SHIFT-space then "O" then SHIFT-space then "B", "T", "A", "X", all with SHIFT-spaces in between, all those characters would plot on top of each other, and the result would be the smiley as shown above in the "WOBTAX" example.

UNQUOTE

Thanks V. of TYR for passing this along to Al.

I remember that before computers there were people using typewriter special characters in various shapes to make art that preceded ASCII art, and there were also people who shared decks of punched cards that drew Christmas Art. No matter what the technology, there is a mentality out there that will figure out how to make it create beautiful stuff, blowing the minds of the ordinary users.

Wed, 18 Sep 2002 20:02:51 GMT

[Ernie the Attorney] QUOTE

Read this CNN article. I'm glad that the government is not going to

collect money to use for enhancing security (that would just increase the likelihood of preciptious action), nor
restrict the use of wireless networks (which apparently was a brainstorm of the Bush administration's main computer guru).

UNQUOTE [Ernie the Attorney]

The article identifies government plans based on some government officials not knowing all the facts about what is possible with computer security. It sure sounds like the current administration decided not to get any kind of briefing from prior administration efforts with computer security, so they would make a whole set of new mistakes, without learning from the mistakes or discoveries of the folks who went before. Homeland Cyber Security is too important to be left to a panel of special interests. I sure hope there is more going on than the media is sharing.

Wed, 18 Sep 2002 05:22:09 GMT

White House To Unveil New Plan for U.S. Computer Security [SecurityFocus] [dws.]

There's been a lot of press about the role Microsoft's responsibilities should play in the White House big picture as opposed to the role it really is playing. Wasn't there a former Microsoft Security Expert who got hired to become a White House Security Expert? I have to be careful with my big mouth here, since I consider some other places much more appropriate sources of talent for our Government.

Top Story in this week's http://www.eweek.com/ is what should be a copy of the President's Plan for Cyber Security and the notion that they now will seek public support for the plan, and also possibly get second opinions from other people in the know, before the President signs it.

Top Story in this week's e week Security pages is a progress report on how various industries are doing moving towards better computer security, such as mass transit, power plants, communications, etc. followed by a survey of computer security professionals.

The results imply that almost half of the nation's infrastructure has done nothing different about computer security since 9/11/2001, and that this constitutes criminal negligence. Now I think that some enterprises were probably doing proper security before 9/11/2001 and did not need to do anything other than a review. One person was quoted as saying that proper security requires incremental gains in Security each year. I think it is better to get your security as good as you can get it, and keep it that way, except when the security risks are so bad that installing patches to fix patches to fix patches to fix patches to fix ... means that you can get nothing else done with your time, so what you should be doing is learning a different Operating System that does not need that behavior, assuming that other Operating System is not going to be declared illegal by pending legislation.

For my past Weblog posts on computer security topics see

Sep 16 on Y2K of copying;
Aug 29 on diagnosing hoax and computer security myths vs. serious downage;
and Aug 15 on how Computer Security does not have to be rocket science.

Mon, 16 Sep 2002 22:30:03 GMT

Anthrax spread by photocopier [USA Today : Front Page]

Mon, 16 Sep 2002 15:46:30 GMT

[Ernie the Attorney] had started a discussion about copyright and Professor Lessig, which is extremely important considering the Supreme Court hearing coming up, and some special interest legislation to change the fabric of our computer society. There are several different professional specialities at work here and there is a large element of what seems to me to be deliberate confusion, like the role of the accountants in the Wall Street scandals.

What society needs, in Al Macintyre opinion, is an even more basic for dummies clarification even than Ernie calls for. The powers that be, who vote to change the rules, need to get a distinction between what is being proposed and what can be done, and to what degree that distinction is colored by the proposers desires for something other than what they claim. People propose stuff that seems ridiculous for reasons that sound suspicious. Technologically speaking, can we get protection against piracy without locking down an entire genre of entertainment? I think that is feasable.

There needs to be some clarification of what can be done in the computer security area to protect all interests. As far as I am concerned the problem is not whether fans can continue to enjoy whatever they want, with copyright owners properly compensated, but rather how is the development of that to be financed. I doubt that the competing interests can come together to solve the problem in the absense of a crisis.

Open Source can have some standards of identifying copyright ownership, delivering a code into the data objects showing royalties paid, when permission to use expires, and renewal arrangements, with software being certified as having met the copying of copyright materials artist compensation standards.

But that is extra work for people writing software for Windows, much simpler to close the door on any copying. Ditto hardware development.

Some Open Source was born out of an alternative to abuses of Commercial Software, where some Open Source philosophers have been rather outspoken on the inappropriateness of copyright in software that has many contributors constantly making improvements to a body of code. People, outside of software development, can rightfully misconstrue those strong views to be from a special interest that cannot be trusted to manage copyrights, especially when we also have an overlapping community of digital product users who appear to favor piracy.

The market can make demands of suppliers of hardware and software, but that is no good when legislation has authorized draconian solutions to the piracy problem.

This is the Y2K of copying.

A panic is apparently needed to mobilize a solution.

The difference between what we have today, and the Y2K of a few years ago is who is behind the panic. I am a Computer Professional who first found out about the Y2K problem (it was not called that then) in 1970, and it was old news even then. We were unable to get responsible action through channels, so we had to go to the general public to avert a general disaster.

I don't have a good handle on the forces behind today's panic, nor if what is being painted in the communications clearly explain their motives, but it does seem extremely ominous calling for excessive drastic action to get a solution, out of proportion to the problem. Comparable to stopping automotive speeding by issuing WW II weaponry to the police in which it does not matter if there are lots of casualities to other vehicles on the road.

QUOTE [Ernie the Attorney]

DRM for Dummies (i.e. people like me) - the discussion below (which I guess I started) about the Lessig article has prompted many interesting responses, including one from the good professor himself (boy do I feel like I'm back in law school). Anyway, after reading all of the responses my brain started heating up like an over-clocked CPU. I like things to be simple, and I don't like to tax my brain so I'm looking for a simple model to understand Lessig's point.

Lessig (if I understand his point) says something like: Palladium is better DRM because at least it's not a blanket system that disables all copying of, say, music CD's. I guess there are other examples, but I don't know enough to come up with some good ones. (Professor Lessig, can you offer us a sampler platter of examples?) Anyway, if all of the examples involve locking down an otherwise-routine computer function like copying then, call me crazy, but that's not "digital rights management." It's digital rights censorship. Now, if there is a system that lets me use a routine computer function, but only if I meet certain conditions, well now...at least that's "management" of my digital rights. So that's how I understand it now, and I think that my brain can handle that.

And so now I can load that model into the "big picture" of DRM. From what I can see, basically, we're talking about which StormTrooper we'd prefer to have watch over us: the really mean one that never lets our computer do anything that might trip over someone's copyright golden goose, or the sort-of mean one that will let our computer do some things, if we have permission from The Empire's duly appointed representative. Yeah, I did misunderstand Lessig. I apologize for branding his description as "optimistic." And I hope that my lackluster class participation will not count too heavily against my final grade.

UNQUOTE [Ernie the Attorney]

Ernie

I have worked on several different kinds of Computer Operating Systems in my career and seen many different Computer Security models, much more sophisticated than what I think is needed to solve this crisis. For security reasons, the end computer user was generally told nothing about how the security operated. Often many software developers not allowed to work with the security area. This has meant that computer security is often like a separate interface between Operating System and Application Software, not well understood by developers who should be using it properly.

My best suggestion to you is much the same as one I made some time ago on Homeland Security. We have people in different professions with specialized know how that is really needed by other professions in our world of evolving challenges. I think we need briefings across professions. What do we _____ (profession A) think that people in _____ (profession B) ought to know about _____ (topics C D E F), from our perspective, so as to get the best possible solution?

I have written about computer security several times several places with links to where you can find professionals far more knowledgeable than I to help you understand what our realistic options are, with nonsense replaced by clarity, most recently Aug 29 and Aug 15 on topics of Computer Security Myths explained for Dummies, with annotated key links to Computer Security Authoritative information like

http://www.pentasafe.com

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/e-com-sec/

http://www.ifccfbi.gov

http://www.radium.ncsc.mil/tpep/epl/epl-by-vendor.html

I think most reasonable people will agree that we have a bad problem in our society with computer piracy, and one way the problem could be solved would be to ban computers, but that would be a ridiculous solution. A lot of what I am seeing, as proposed solutions to a bad problem, are what I would label as a ridiculous solution.

What the copyright owners seem to be asking for is to throw the baby out with the bath water. There is a serious problem with intellectual property rights piracy, so lock down on what used to be legitimate entertainment, similar to in Greece where they have so much trouble stopping Gambling, they now banned many other kinds of games such as On Line Chess. More details on that here.

I like to play some computer games. There are swap stores where we can take in the box that has all the materials associated with that product, to trade in, and we swear that we have taken it off of our PC. Nothing to put our signature to, and no independent verification that we have done so. It is like the 2 for 1 used book places. The opportunities for people to steal here, in the same way that video rentals could be copied while in customer homes, seem like obvious risk of piracy.

I was not much into copying music until my Sister cut her own stuff and offered to send me what she had composed the music, written the words, performed the whole thing, and now had it in a form that could be sent as an e-mail attachment. I am struggling to understand if she as the copyright owner of this artistic creation even has the right under the new regime to share her work that way. It seems to me that artists are not allowed to be independent of publishers, like authors would not be allowed to get their work to their readers except going through publishers who will own all copyrightable material. Now I could be mistaken, but it seems to me that is the way this kind of legislation is headed.

Wed, 11 Sep 2002 19:01:34 GMT

[Boing Boing Blog] QUOTE

Private moonlanding green-lighted. Private moon-landings ahoy! They're planning a three-month exploration of the big ole rock!

TransOrbital of California has become the first private company in the history of spaceflight to gain approval from the US authorities to explore, photograph and land on the moon.
The US State Department and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have granted it permission to send its TrailBlazer spacecraft into lunar orbit.
The launch is set for June 2003 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Link Discuss (Thanks, John!) UNQUOTE [Boing Boing Blog]

Tue, 10 Sep 2002 06:56:53 GMT

[Russ Lipton Documents Radio] QUOTE

Even though I spent over 20 years consulting to corporate America, I would rather write Radio book(s) for a non-biz audience. Just seems like more fun.

Nevertheless.

Radio (not to mention Frontier/Manila) deserve to be used by every business - and every school - everywhere. Even granting that BigCo's judge UserLand a heavy counter-cultural risk (as if being slaveboys to BigSoftware is safe), that leaves a million or ten other candidates.

It's time to demystify the what-where-why-when-who of Radio for a computer literate, professional but non-technical audience. The paradigm for that audience is the friend of Jon Udell's (don't have the link) whom Jon stepped through a Radio installation. It was just way hard and the jargon way confusing.

To some degree, this is unavoidable. It doesn't mean Radio is hard to use. Given what you can do with it, hard to use compared with ... ?

Still, Radio/RCS embeds a decade of design and lore covering the entire history of the Internet:

Web servers.
Browsers.
Scripting languages.
Authoring products.
Web design tools.
Desktop clients.
Interoperability.
Publish-and-subscribe.
... and the acronymns that support them and more: HTTP. FTP. HTML. XML. XML-RPC. SOAP. RSS. OPML.

Nor are these mere jargon-y acronymns (yeah, we have plenty others of those). The ones above support entire worlds of functionality over which Radio is layered. Layered well or poorly? Well. Very well. But not so well that weblogging/K-logging isn't still terribly confusing to millions of people who are as smart (and often smarter) than 'our kind of people'.

So, my audience will be:

Technical management - decision-makers for determining corporate standards.

Project leaders - they need to understand how Userland's products support a wide variety of shared spaces.

Professional end-users - journalists, marketers, sales, lawyers, doctors, teachers, scientists et al.

The goal will be to show how Radio can be interwoven across a given organization or project team through specific use(s) to support a hierarchy of shared spaces that mediate identity and knowledge. Profound mouthful.

No, this ain't gonna be a mere white paper-ish book. If I wanted to do that, I wouldn't focus on Radio (and, behind Radio ... Frontier/Manila). I'd keep it vaguely generic.

Au contraire, I'm betting on these specific products, which means: how to think about them (sure) but also and emphatically how to USE THEM. With weblogging, 'philosophy' and 'use' converge entirely.

On Wednesday, some thoughts about the theme I will emphasize to this audience. Can you find it signalled above?

What do you think? Right audience? Wrong audience? Who cares?

UNQUOTE [Russ Lipton Documents Radio]

Compare this to the electric typewriter. Once upon a time business people had an army of clerks using typewriters and another army proof reading, and then it had to be retyped to remove the mistakes, and the cost to get one error-free business letter produced was astronomical. Then we got word processing with built in proof reading. Well now in today's reality, people want web sites, but to get the job done they have to hire an army of expensive consultants to lay them out. Radio Weblog to that reality is like Word Processing was to the electric typewriter.

Now Word Processing threw that army out of work, so at same time perhaps we have responsibility to see how we can stimulate the economy so the out of work people have new stuff to keep them productive, and getting pay checks. I do not believe that beginners need to get into News Aggregation and Blogrolling and various other esoteric stuff. The software developers can make a good living supplying end user beginners with tools to automate stuff that now people have to tweak stuff inside Radio to get to work. Have a focus on getting the masses comfortable with Weblogging.

There is a potential hunger out there with all the people who are sick and tired of spam, computer viruses, flames, and all the baggage that goes with e-mail, but not willing to give up e-mail, like years ago I knew people who gave up the telephone because they could not stand all the anonymous obscene phone calls. Hey but give them an alternative, and provide a smooth path to learning the basics, and the Radio customer base can really take off, thus supporting an army of Open Source Tool makers to support that new customer base.

Years ago, when I went to computer stores, there used to be a hand out folder of basics that any new computer buyer needed to know, like

Do you need Intel inside or not, and what is the significance of that question? (No you do not need Intel inside.)
Can you run a home PC with an alternate to Microsoft (yes) and what are the practical alternatives?
What kinds of things should any computer have (anti-virus, power protection, expandability to more memory disk etc.)?

Well for potential new Radio customers, we need to identify what are the basics that they have to know, and no more.

When I go to Barnes and Noble, or Books a Million, or one of those other book stores, there are wall to wall shelves of how to books on scores if not hundreds of different computer topics, but narry a thing about Radio Userland or Blogging. Many people like the old fashioned how to book to help them figure out how to work some computer product. What there should be is a whole shelf of books devoted to Weblogging, with many authors providing competing products, so that the overall documentation quality will improve.

We get magazines with computer tips. There should be not one but several that have a regular column on Radio Userland tips. But also get the Journalist Bloggers to explain to Big Business and Big Government what the value is to them getting on this bandwagon.

Add to the audience top executives of mid sized companies. How will this benefit their company? How does one setup a trial of this over a period of a few months?

Think Law Enforcement. The cop on the beat in the patrol car keys something into wireless PC (that has proper security) or verbally records, or uses camera that is in the cop car. This goes to the weblog for that police patrol area, inside the city's intranet, so the data is only seen by authorized people. The fact that a cop recorded some info is picked up by Instant Outlining, which knows the location of the cop, because of Global Positioning gadget tied into the cop technology. This means that back at HQ, a map lights up with a little icon indicating where some report was just made. Some human can click on that icon to read the report. The icon will be color coded as to whether this is general information, or seriousness of an emergency.

Add to the audience low level politicians who want to climb the ladder of their profession. They can use their weblog to let the folks back home see what a good job they doing, and along the way they get an education in copyright and privacy issues.

Mom and Pop stores have computers. I order a Pizza and they look up from my phone number, about my last order (I can say, this is Al Macintyre, and I want my usual), and where I am located. I am not sure that some of these places need Weblogging. They just need a good system for tracking their inventory consumption for reorders.

But if they want to advertise on the Internet, a Weblog is a cheap way to get a splashy presence. This applies to all kinds of small retail outfits.

The newbie discussion lists are getting some developer questions. There needs to be some gradation, perhaps a hierarchy of peer groups that are at various stages of learning Radio.

Tue, 10 Sep 2002 06:00:11 GMT

[Morgan Wilson's Exploded Library] shares [How Appealing] news that The Eldred v. Ashcroft reply brief was filed in the U.S. Supreme Court and the 29 pages can now be viewed online at this PDF link.

There are obviously a bunch of heavyweight petitioners on behalf of many solid interests, such as preserving our early heritage, and placing public domain literature in a form that it can be read to the blind (Doesn't the US Disabilities Act have some requirement that things should be accessible to the Blind and people with other disabilities?)

But lobbyists who asked Congress to do the other side of this are also a bunch of heavyweights.

What a shame there can't be some compromise that offers copyright owners an option of opting in or out of this deal, and also provide exemptions for public domain, proprietory systems (open and closed) that have independent protection schemes.

Tue, 10 Sep 2002 01:14:10 GMT

[Asia Business Intelligence] QUOTE

elgooG won elbissecca ni anihC?

Slashdot posts a discussion of a "backwards" Google search engine that appears to defeat China's filter. But how many Chinese will know to use it? Besides, this writer couldn't make it work in Chinese!

That said, the concept is interesting. A New Scientist article on the site is viewable here.

UNQUOTE [Asia Business Intelligence]

I have found really neat things before on New Scientist ... that is a great site to explore.

Mon, 09 Sep 2002 19:20:45 GMT

[Boing Boing Blog] QUOTE

Ten things the Net got right. Dan Gillmor's new column -- it's hard to pick a quote from this, the whole thing's just so right on.

Link Discuss UNQUOTE [Boing Boing Blog]

I think what helped get it right was for the infrastructure to not be owned by one vendor, putting the Information Highway out there for anyone to connect to and use, having competion between different providers of different services.

Government funding of research has often been healthy for a nation, such as Department of Defense ARPANET into the Universities.

I think some politicians collected votes by pushing for better computer education in the school system.

Sat, 07 Sep 2002 23:12:13 GMT

In any search engine, check out Crypto Zoology. Weird creatures that different people believe in. I can accept that perhaps one or two of these are real, but not all.

There's mad science that some people believe in but other people consider them crazy in the head for being so enthusiastic about. Pyramid Power, UFOs, X-Files, Time Travel, Illumninati. Often valid science has its start in crazy theories. Today it is widely accepted that the Dinosaurs were wiped out thanks to Giant Meteor Impact upon planet Earth. Creationists argue how many years ago that was, because Carbon Dating makes planet Earth older than Bible says it can be. But the idea that Giant Meteors hit planet Earth and do various chaos, that was mad science for many many years before it became generally accepted theory.

Now here comes the Atlantic with an interview of Rick Cook, a respected defense and aerospace reporter for Jane's Defence Weekly, whose new book, The Hunt for Zero Point: Inside the Classified World of Anti-Gravity technology, documents his ten year search for a mythical technology. This Atlantic connection is worth reading. There's a lot of interesting stuff here, but I will treat it as Science Fiction for a while. I enjoyed Chariots of the Gods, but as fiction, not taking it seriously. Thanks to V of TYR for e-mailing this link to Al.

If this stuff is for real, in which some researchers can really do it on a shoe string, then America had better win the War against Terrorism before the cat is let out of this black bag.

Sat, 07 Sep 2002 00:25:58 GMT

Checking my Radio referrers, of who linked to my weblog site today, I see that someone was checking on banking mistakes and I was # 45 out of 16402 search engine hits. It amazes me how much stuff is out there on some topics, and how high I show up in some searches.

See my "Banking Stories" for what they found of my prior remarks.

The bottom line moral for Everyone, is that bank clerks are just like you and me.

Everyone makes mistakes, including people who handle your money accounts at your bank. You have to watch them like a hawk. Their mistakes are potentially more serious for you than mistakes made by other clerks that we do business with.

People are more likely to make mistakes right after other mistakes. In other words when something disturbs our normal routine, we get rattled, distracted, more likely to make more mistakes. So one mistake leads to mistakes fixing original mistake.

This means that tech support people need to stay calm and not contribute to the nervousness that is out there.

Checking referers can sometimes find us other stuff of interest ... I was # 3 in an International search for Computer Security Future, and I see a link on the same page to the International Society of Mad Scientists on the topic of Saudi Arabia's interest in Quantum Computing for Security purposes, which interests me now that IBM has the world's first Quantum Computer in one of their labs. ISMS home page has lots of links to weird stuff that I think is really borderline people out of touch with reality.

Thu, 05 Sep 2002 21:23:31 GMT

Comment on Al's Radio Doc Sources using Quick Topics. Eventually, Al wants to look into pros & cons of several different commenting systems for Radio, but we have to start some place.

Mon, 02 Sep 2002 19:39:43 GMT

[Brian at Counter Moon in Evansville] has link to interesting story at [Slashdot] that perhaps [Bob Morris with Politics of Water] might like to add to his collection. QUOTE

Sections

apache
Aug 22

apple
Sep 2
(3 recent)

articles
Sep 2
(32 recent)

askslashdot
Aug 31
(4 recent)

books
Aug 30

bsd
Aug 24

developers
Aug 30

features
Jul 18

interviews
Aug 26

radio
Jun 29

science
Sep 1
(4 recent)

yro
Sep 2
(2 recent)

Water + Salt + Energy = Clean!

Posted by chrisd on Sunday September 01, @07:59PM
from the don't-know-that-I'd-drink-it dept.
codesmith.ca writes "CTV News is reporting about a device built at the Russian Institute for Medical Engineering that can convert standard water and salt into an antimicrobial solution. Apparently it's works on almost anything (virii, bacteria, cysts...) and it's safe for human consumption to boot. I can't find a site for the institute, but there are articles around. This one is fairly detailed, but hard to reach. Here's the Google cache. Here's one about a paper shows it's not exactly super-new technology." Any chemist care to comment on what sounds to be too good to be true?

UNQUOTE [Slashdot]

This is real interesting cut and paste - I tried to snip out what was not relevant but was unable to do so. I will be interested to see how this Renders to my Radio Site.

Sun, 01 Sep 2002 17:32:19 GMT

Thanks to V of TYR for e-mailing me these urls.

Holographic imaging scanner sees right through you
There have been several news stories with privacy concerns about an airport scanner in which passengers are rendered like naked.

http://go.hotwired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,54598,00.html/wn_ascii
This technology, developed by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (http://www.pnl.gov/), has had some enhancements to try to solve the privacy concerns, while still addressing the security topic.
The computer data can now be split so that the naked body is not shown on the screen, instead all the objects the person is carrying under the clothing is put on an image of a manikin. Here is a
[sample image: http://www.pnl.gov/nsd/commercial/scanner/ ]
There are some other future applications of this technology, discussed in the article, such as the clothing industry getting a perfect fit.
There are also implied applications not discussed, such as what pornography enthusiasts might use it for. Think X-Ray glasses worn by dirty minds, that would just look at the bodies, forget the objects. Think hackers into the Airport Security bit stream to look at the portion that is censored on the screen.

Tue, 20 Aug 2002 10:36:05 GMT

To subscribe to this blog in Radio.

Just click the orange "coffee cup" XML button on the left

[Asia Business Intelligence]

I thought I would repeat this how to for folks who are behind me on the Radio Education learning curve. Al's Radio Weblog reflects the wide spectrum of Al interests, and is at only the early stages of figuring out how to use this technology.

Tue, 20 Aug 2002 09:21:58 GMT

[Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog] QUOTE

I've been reading the History of the telephone, as written in 1910 by Herberst Casson. It has been very refreshing to read how hard it was for Bell to get anyone to notice, look ar listen to his new device. In fact, it wasn't until he sent a 'news story' at a distance of 16 miles, that he received the attention he needed: the press. Seems they only react when their own business affected.

So much of this story is analogous to weblogs. Their invention, mis(understanding) and application all pretty much went through the same stages. Here's one you'll recognize:
"There were hundreds of shrewd capitalists in American cities in 1876, looking with sharp eyes in all directions for business chances; but not one of them came to Bell with an offer to buy his patent. Not one came running for a State contract. And neither did any legislature, or city council, come forward to the task of giving the people a cheap and efficient telephone service."

It gets better: " ......it was a most unpropitious time for the setting afloat of a new enterprise. It was a period of turmoil and suspicion. What with the Jay Cooke failure, the Hayes-Tilden deadlock, and the bursting of a hundred railroad bubbles, there was very little in the news of the day to encourage investors."

UNQUOTE [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]

[Blogfish] QUOTEs Adam Curry quoting Dave Winer

Dave: "How do people make money with weblogs," asks the happy blogger who wonders out loud.
"How do people make money with telephones and word processors," asks some random wise-ass. Beautiful!
QUOTING [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]

UNQUOTE [Blogfish]

Money is made based on the content transmitted, such as newspapers, and jobs for people who can read a script on telephone spam.

Money is made based on services to the people who struggle to use the technology effectively, such as the folks who do house calls to clean the dust out the inside of personal computers, and value added plug-ins that users are willing to pay money to get.

The history of the telephone has had to have been rewritten since 1910 thanks to the controversy over who really invented it. Check out this thread in an off-topic forum of www.AirDisaster.com

http://www.airdisaster.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&;f=2&t=001470

The exchange of information is as follows, between people with the same kind of wild identities as Bloggers use:

[Sherlock]: Antonnio Meuci, an Italian Engineer, invented the telephone in 1850 and was unable to sell it. It gathered dust on a shelf in a Long Island Laboratory for Bell to find and patent.
There was some debate over whether or not it worked before Bell improved it, or whether Bell's patent was identical to Meuci's earlier published description.
[Ed]: Part of the process of invention is telling the world about the invention, and in fact managing to sell it.
[me]: misc.
[Sherlock]: It is still stealing to take another man's work and claim it as your own.
[me thought]: Only if you are caught doing that.
[Jim]: National Geographic Society on where the telephone was invented and Dual Citizenship Bell Family Tree. The first publicized stunt as opposed to perfecting and researching the process in advance.
[Adoucette]: US Congress House Resolution 269 on Antonio Meucci inventing the telephone in Cuba then moving to New York, demonstrated it, published description in newspaper, went bankrupt.
[Fearless Freep]: Initial research on the Light Bulb in the mid 1800's. First patent 1874 for a Canadian inventor, bought out by Edison's buddies to be replaced with Edison's invention.

Mon, 19 Aug 2002 23:16:21 GMT

The Greenpeace Blog has lots of interesting stuff, and also a few design bugs. I did a post to their comments area, and it still says zero comments. Gilla asks for people to e-mail suggestions to her (him?) but where the e-mail link invokes my old AOL archives (I am now using Eudora for my e-mail).

I can't figure out how to Radio subscribe to [http://weblog.greenpeace.org/ powered by Moveable Type] QUOTE

a comprehensive list of safer ways to avoid invasions of indoor pests.

"Spiders:
Under ideal conditions, do not kill spiders because they help to control pests."

Every web developer should read this book, since more and more people with disabilites access websites and they simply cannot be left out.

also check out their zip code nuclear reactor finder

UNQUOTE [http://weblog.greenpeace.org/]

Lots more good stuff in their archives.

I saw on C-Span not so long ago that

100% of the US nuclear power plants were tested for terrorist threats.
50% of them failed the test for NORMAL terrorist attacks.
NONE of them passed any test for protection against cyber attacks.
The problem is that control systems, like Air Traffic Control, Water Treatment, etc. were built as stand alone units, with zero consideration for any security other than physical security. Now corporate and government managers are linking those instruments to their computer networks because they want to know what's going on, but many networks are brain brain dead on security, because after all, the information in the networks are not that important to protect, but that is not the case for some of these control systems.
This management philosophy gave us the Challenger disaster.
I fear we are overdue for another disaster.

Mon, 19 Aug 2002 21:24:43 GMT

Here I correlate multiple stories about the West Nile Virus problem, that apparently is worse thanks to Humans who think they know what they are doing when trying to manipulate the Environment. I have commented at other times and places about how come I think the Fires out West are largely a problem of our own making. We collectively need an education in how not to manipulate our environment.

[Bob Morris: The Politics of Water] QUOTE

Are retention ponds breeding West Nile mosquitoes?

Yow, attempts to clean up the water may be providing breeding grounds for mosquitoes.

Public officials across the country are inadvertently creating vast breeding grounds for mosquitoes -- including those that carry the West Nile virus -- by installing stormwater retention ponds near businesses and homes in an effort to reduce the contaminants that collect in water.

As concern over the mosquito-borne virus heightens, the effort to create new ponds and to clean up old ones has pit two environmental causes against each other.

UNQUOTE [Bob Morris: The Politics of Water]

Bob Morris's source is the [Washington Post].

Warning: the intensity of Pop Up ads is so fierce that if your PC is hurting for resources, like mine often is, you are at grave risk of the Bill Gates advertisement for more money spent on PC resources, popularly known as the Blue Screen Of Death.

It is apparent to me, from the Washington Post story, that these government mandated West Nile Breeding ponds are needed for many reasons, and the people who operate them do not consider the West Nile virus to be a serious problem.

I think the solution to this would be for the families of victims of the West Nile to do a class action suit against the polluters.
Simple cause and effect.
Don't put the pollutants into the environment in the first place.
So we don't need these ponds that invite mosquito breeding grounds.
It does not matter if you cannot trace back which mosquito, that killed your loved ones, bred at which pond, which was needed because of which pollution.
What matters is you find polluters with deep pockets.
This then sends a chilling message to other polluters.

Pollutants are not the only problem.

I think a bigger problem, especially near where I live, are poorly designed drainage systems. A city near where I live was recently sued because in the same trench in the ground they ran storm drain overflow, and sewage disposal, and drinking water. They did that to save money on construction costs. Sorry I can't cite a url on this. I got the info from the real world grapevine.

But let's not panic over how long this will take to resolve.

I am paraphrasing [CDC FAQ on West Nile]

Even in an area where there are infected mosquitos most of them do not have it, and of the humans who get bitten by an infected mosquito, only 1% of them are at risk.

end of info I got from [CDC FAQ on West Nile]

so if you get bitten by a mosquito, there is no reason to have a panic attack.

I saw an interesting tip on the wee hours TV.

You are out camping, bothered by mosquitos, and other small flying critters. Put some mint on the side of your food plate, such as chewing gum unwrapped but not consumed. It will drive away the bugs.

Hmm, does chewing mint flavored gum keep them away from your face?

I just learned a new use for junk food.

[Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog] QUOTE

Now we finally know what mosquitoes do in the grand scheme of life. UNQUOTE [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]

Adam's link is to a story on USA states responding to Centers for Disease Control prediction that 1,000 people could be infected with this deadly miniature terrorist in the next year. That AP story has additional links to more on this problem.

Now combine Bob Morris story with

[Boing Boing Blog] QUOTE

Greenpeace blog. Greenpeace has a blog. It'd be great if NGOs around the world started doing this. In particular, it'd be great if some of the sustainable development NGOs like Youth Challenge International had blogging set up from their base-camps, so that project staff could make some notes about their projects while they're back at HQ. Geekhalla, the geek-house in Accra, Ghana, that the Geekcorps volunteers live in, has blog, but are there others? I'd love to read a blog maintained by the crews on Greenpeace's boats, too. Link Discuss (Thanks, Gillo!)

UNQUOTE [Boing Boing Blog]

If they are not already doing so, I think Greenpeace should be subscribing to Bob Morris on the Politics of Water.

Incidentally, I found out about Bob Morris by randomly looking at recently updated Blogs, most of which were not of interest to me, but there are some gems out there that make the Blog Surfing worthwhile.

What is the correct terminology for Blog Surfing?

Sun, 18 Aug 2002 12:23:12 GMT

Prospective future categories for my Weblog content based on my initial interests. I will need short labels for each so as to save space on directory list columns and width of urls.

Computing
- PC Al = Al home PC adventures & periodic melt downs
- PC = World of Micro Computers (PC and Apple)
- Com Big = Bigger than a Micro (e.g. IBM)
- Com Sec = Security
- Also review random stuff I try out or explore
Documentation and Education
- BPCS = My day job's ERP
- PC Ed = Basics (Browser, e-mail, Norton, Microsoft love hate relationship)
- RU Ed = Al generally figuring out Radio Userland
  - FAQ (dws connection)
e-Organization (careful - Radio url drops dash of e- anything from Story linkage) and Internet Navigation topics
- E all (users) = Accessibility
- E good = Better Writing
- E law
- E link = Deep Linking
- Al 2 do = Personal to do reminders
- E what = Topics Indexing
- E nice = Web Design
- E stuck = Quicksand and miscelaneous other
Friends and Family
Humor
- I will probably populate the Gems, after I figure out how to navigate them
News Junkie that I am
- Book Reviews
- HisTech = History of Technology
- Military History and current trends
- Politics
- World News Today
SF = Science Fiction and Science Fact Frontiers
- SF TT = My Time Travel Simulation Game

Sun, 18 Aug 2002 02:24:44 GMT

Al struggles to learn "Radio url number system".

Wed, 14 Aug 2002 04:24:00 GMT

Jim Martindale's Reference Desk is the e-Organization to emulate (thanks to Search Day for finding this link), with more than 25,000 pages and I have no trouble whatsoever navigating them. Is this guy an e-librarian? Does Jenny Levine know about this? This is almost better than a Search Engine.

Wed, 14 Aug 2002 03:34:47 GMT

[Boing Boing Blog] QUOTE: Email turns twenty today!. Twenty years ago today, the IETF approved RFC 822, standardizing ARPANet email. Link Discuss (Thanks, Richard!) UNQUOTE [Boing Boing Blog] Al's earlier post on the history of e-mail, linked to Datamation interview with Ray Tomlinson who invented e-mail in 1971. This does not compute 2002-1971 = 31 years, not 20.

Time to check out the Search Day Internet Calculator.

Calculators On-Line Center
http://www-sci.lib.uci.edu/HSG/RefCalculators.html
More than 15,000 calculators covering virtually every specialized type of calculation imaginable.

Was ARPANet (invented 1969?) the first Internet, but wasn't it based on previous technology? I remember using computer networking in the 1970's but it wasn't e-mail. It was BBS forums, where we would use typewriters connected to phone lines (GUI not yet invented, and computer data NOT on TV sets yet - I not remember when that started) to dial up to rent time on big computers, and connect to the relevant group, print out other people posts, and key in our posts. It wasn't e-mail, but we were talking to people thousands of miles away, by computer. I typically had a series of sessions, printing out stuff, then signing off to figure out my replies, because we were paying $60.00 a minute connect time, not counting the long distance phone bill.

My suspicion is that Boing Boing is identifying an e-mail standard that was approved 20 years ago, but we know from the standards movement today that things happen for decades before any agreement is reached on a standard.

I have been corrected by Master Communications History. It was not 1971 but 1972, so e-mail is thirty years old this year.

Wed, 14 Aug 2002 02:00:52 GMT

e-Privacy assurances in our climate of anti-terrorism legislation is the topic of this e-week column by John Taschek. Ernie the Attorney offers this link to Charles C. Mann Atlantic Homeland Insecurity article on security systemic problems in general, and here is Ernie's earlier post on Security in general. Here are some examples of our general state of Insecurity thinking.

The US government has several networks never connected to the Internet, accessible only withing physically secure buildings. But they've been infected by computer viruses because humans with lap tops connect to both the Internet and the secure networks, and bypass the security. The weakest link are the government users.
Kerkhoff's Principle: A good crypto system QUOTE should be able to fall into the enemy's hands without disadvantage. UNQUOTE
Encrypting Internet transactions, says Purdue computer scientist Eugene Spafford, QUOTE is the equivalent of arranging an armored car to deliver credit-card info from someone living in a cardboard box to someone living on a park bench. UNQUOTE
Airport Security thinks that protection against car bombings is practical by having cars park 300 feet away from the terminal, but at the same time passengers can be dropped off right in front of the terminal. That does not compute.
Airports have to be evacuated all the time because of security breaches. There is no way to shut down just the portion of the people movement where the problem occurred.
Carjacking is on the rise partly because Automobile Manufacturers have made it more difficult to hot wire an unattended vehicle.
QUOTE Bank Vaults are secure because to break in takes real skill.
Computers are not, because to break in takes practically no skill.
Millions of credit card numbers have been stolen from computer networks. UNQUOTE
German reporters tested a face recognition system, and iris scanner, and nine fingerprint readers. All of them could be spoofed using output from a lap top screen. They photographed an authorized user, blew up the face, cut out the pupils, help the image before their faces like a mask, and the iris scanner was spoofed. An authorized user's fingerprints were lifted from a drinking glass, on a tape pressed against the fingerprint reader, which accepted the data as valid.
A corporation replaced paper ballots with electronic shareholder voting, which was hacked into. Now they cannot reconstruct original votes.
Since 9/11, at least 40 government networks have been cracked by vandals.
People have trouble with passwords so an easy way to do industrial espionage is to offer pornographic web sites to business people in which they need a password. Odds are they would use the same password there as for everywhere else.

Mon, 12 Aug 2002 19:03:49 GMT

I have recently rediscovered some stuff we can do with Radio News Aggregation (subscribing to other web sites whose traffic particularly interests us). Oh yes, I had read the documentation and struggled to understand what it all means. But sometimes the DOING is educational.

Thanks to Dave Winer [Scripting News] link to Ray Ozzie on why weblogs are good for discourse. Yes. Flames don't attract. New ideas do. Weblogs can have a high signal-to-noise ratio. Powerful statements are possible in this medium, where powerlessness rules in discussion fora. In this medium everyone can have the last word. UNQUOTE [Scripting News]

I agree with Ray that architecture can be critical. We see in the Computer Security debate that people are trying the impossible. We have software out there that did not have security considered in the original design, so it is like putting a padlock on a tent, or a house of cards, to make the results secure after the fact, when it is discovered that security should have been there all along.

The power of a network are the number of people connected to it. The value of a fax machine is the fact that millions of other businesses are networked to that technology. With many architectures we have unwanted participants: flames; spam; intruders; other dysfunctional human behavior, that we label as noise getting in the way of useful signal content. Ray is absolutely correct that the signal to noise ratio is extremely high with Blogging. Plus, he does a great job of explaining how the architecture of Blogging makes that a reality.

One downside of this is the risk that Blogging will eat excessive amounts of our time that could be more constructively expended. Just as earlier generations of technological enthusiasts became TV couch potatoes, or in my case I used to spend hours every day dealing with e-mail, because there were hundreds of interesting posts I wanted to read, but I had to wade through a high ratio of spam and virus forwardings to get at the good stuff.

By moving from AOL to Eudora, my e-mail is automatically categorized into that which I can look at any old time, and the more urgent categories. I can always go to the directory of mailboxes and highlighted are which boxes contain e-mail not yet opened.

News Aggregation of Web Site subscriptions has something similar. It comes in, but I do not need to look at it right away, and even if archives from weeks ago get lost, there is a continual stream of new fascinating material for my perusal.

Personal 2 do list ... the last time I backed up my Radio was beginning of July, and since then I have increased my Web Subscriptions to 15, and made some alterations to my Template, let alone the posts here. My desk top dynamics also have changed. My Screen Saver's unused CPU seconds are now working on finding a cure for cancer http://members.ud.com/about/

Mon, 12 Aug 2002 08:49:29 GMT

It is too easy for me to get carried away by an infinity of topics that are interesting to me.

I need to periodically review the guide to sane blogging.

"Is this important?"
- In the eyes of the beholder.
"Why Is This Important?"
- I guess when I get fully going on Categories I should have an ABOUT statement.
"Who Cares?"
"What Does It Mean?"
"Is it worth explaining?"

Fri, 19 Jul 2002 17:23:31 GMT

Today's Topic = Appreciating History Perspectives.

Datamation interview with Ray Tomlinson who invented e-mail in 1971 and was honored for a lifetime of innovation by Discover magazine.

His current research is on tools and agents to solve logistical problems for the government.

He thinks that if e-mail does not get killed off by spam, he thinks that in the future it will be more integrated with other forms of computer communication.

He thinks spam should be cureable by better technology, but not viruses and worms.

Someone should turn him on to Radio Weblogging Aggregation as an alternative to e-mail.

I would like to have a business card scanner that updates the speed dial talk memory of my telephone, so I can SAY "Call Virginia" and the telephone dials her number, then when everyone has that technology the volume of wrong numbers to me would drop, or I get e-mail from someone and it has their snail mail address - I push a button and it updates my snail mail address book.

Datamation used to be a great dead tree computer magazine, but now they are purely an Internet resource, worth periodically checking out. I was reminded of this by the latest Search Day at:

http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/02/sd0719-news.html

Mon, 20 May 2002 20:11:55 GMT

My opinion on John Robb on The New Economy "John Robb on The New Economy" (incidentally this is my first test of a short cut in Radio & it don't work the way I am accustomed to in Manila).

For commerce to work, it needs a community of interacting people. The Internet encourages a growth in communities. Web sites must be prepared for flash crowds as the word of e-mouth gets out about a great place. An Internet weakness, impeding potential productivity, is the proliferation of misinformed, rumor, conspiracy theorists, virus hoaxes, latest plea from Nigeria.

We can define productivity using a combination of factors, including JT's lessons about working smart, instead of working hard. It is not output per unit of something, but useful output, that contributes to the bottom line either by adding income or reducing costs. Don't measure lines of code from programmers, measure what the programs do, and how long we go from bug disruption to bug disruption, or discovery that some fix didn't, in software we paid hard earned money for. It is not per unit time of the worker, but per unit time that gets paid for, over the life of the person on the payroll. It is not purely by person on the payroll, but also how you factor in office electronics, robots, infrastructure.

The Internet provides us with connections to an infinite wealth of information, for people with finite attention spans, so there is a continuing market for better tools to automate the indexing and searching of that information.

Did the Internet enable a new economy?

(The Internet was invented almost half a century ago thanks to ARPANET in 1969, but it wasn't until the spread of personal computers, invented in the 1970's, to the business world in 80's & 90's that we achieved sufficient critical mass to drive the price down so that a large proportion of the middle class was wired.)

Yes, several in fact, including some gigantic BigCo like Microsoft and AOL. However, to many people "New Economy" is identified with why the dot com collapse, so we need a new terminology to keep what's valid about the Information Economy (e.g. faster exchange of info means faster return on cash flow) separated from what was invalid (e.g. profits not needed, income not needed, everyone loves to work with no pay).

Is the Internet an extension of the past? Yes and No. It has enabled new markets and services in the information age which are engines of productivity and new business. Meanwhile enterprises and industries, that existed long before the Internet are expanding their ways of communicating with customers and suppliers to take advantages of Internet infrastructure.