The sleeping-giant awake again

Thursday, July 04, 2002

Whoopee - success at last. Now I've got a static old stuff folder - see it over there on your left? Soon to be followed by more.

Absolutely hilarious piece on The Register about Microsoft's C# - now is it a hash, a pound or an octothorpe?

6:37:22 PM

All day trying to work around putting more content folders on the site - hope it works this time.
6:18:08 PM

http://www.vmyths.com/rant.cfm?id=410&;page=4 - Rob Rosenberger reassures us that Ossama bin Laden isn't going to destroy us all with a laptop and a 56K modem. He explodes myths about computer viruses and security with lively, opinionated and irreverent commentary on his Vmyths site. Refreshing.

Not so refreshing is the ongoing saga of Worldcom - no links needed, you'll find it all over the place. Wired news quotes a small printer called Greene who said Worldcom was the major topic of conversation at his Chamber of Commerce meeting on Monday night. Meantime, in the corporate Boardrooms, MSN and Earthlink are just two of the ISPs that must be shopping around for alternative carriers at the moment. Some statistics to make your hair stand on end:

Worldcom's UUnet high-speed network carries 70% of US email traffic
UUnet carries 50% of all other email traffic
Worldcom carries more than half of the world's Internet traffic
Worldcom customers include vital US federal agencies

This probably works in our favour because the US government won't be in such a hurry to shut them down. More likely is that, fearing their collapse, their customers will go elsewhere for services and Worldcom will be forced to pull the plug. Rob Rosenbergers response is to suggest that maybe we should just shut the Internet down and regard it as a failed experiment. Scary times.

1:20:35 PM

http://medrants.blogspot.com/ - another blog, about medical matters, very readable considering the subject matter. Links to an article in the NY Times about a possible genetic basis for schizophrenia. I, however, did not read the story because I'm one of those dogged people that won't register for access. More knowledge lost to me I suppose.
12:02:11 PM

http://www.theendoffree.com/ - a blog with a mission to "chronicle free to fee and beyond". Commentary on business models on the Web - including a link to an interesting article in the Guardian on how the Financial Times is organising its subscriptions.
11:50:47 AM

Peggy Noonan: "Blogs may one hard day become clearinghouses for civil support and information when other lines, under new pressure, break down." [Scripting News] After a quick run through of the institutions that failed in the past year in the US, the writer honours those that survived in an article in yesterday's Wall Street Journal.
11:31:29 AM

WorldCom's stumble shakes tech world. The telecommunications giant faces a March trial on SEC allegations of fraud. The aftershocks of $4 billion in improper accounting could hurt hardware sellers and corporate customers. [CNET News.com] Chances are that Juniper will take a hit in revenues because they were a major supplier of routers to Worldcom. Only talking about this to Kev last night - that problem faced by companies like Juniper, Nortel, Cisco and Lucent is that on the one hand they face decreasing demand for their product and on the other, lots of their customers are going out of business. Caught between a rock and a hard place.
11:21:57 AM

On MS - Dave Winer sums it up - It comes down to this, how can they [MS] be a leader if they destroy everything they would hope to lead? [Scripting News] This he says in response to a call he had from Microsoft PR who wanted to know how they could restore his faith in them after his blanket dismissal of Palladium. If push comes to shove we can all switch off our computers and make pottery instead. This reminds me of the day when the Internet went black - anybody remember that, a few years ago. in protest against some US legislation that was closing down Internet freedoms. Is there enough spirit in the blog community for a fun protest? there's definitely enough voice.
11:01:19 AM

Lights go off at eBone. RIP [The Register] KPN Qwest follow Global Crossing and Worldcom down the tubes. Could be a bummer for traffic in Europe for a while. The whole Internet thing is becoming a story of one step forwards and two steps back.
10:50:43 AM