You never hear it, the one that gets you
20:40 PDT
[Scripting News] OK, one more thing. This is from a picture of UserLand’s vision for XML on a whiteboard: Billions of people reading the truth, not bedtime stories. I don’t think thats too much to ask for, do you? In fact, I think that will be tomorrow’s page title. First Amendment and all that…
19:50 PDT
[c|net via slashdot] AOL’s "youth filters" protect kids from Democrats.
America Online provides "youth filters"
that are supposed to keep kids out of dangerous Web
sites--but they seem designed to eliminate creeping
liberalism.
For example, if you've set up AOL to restrict your
children to "Kids Only" Web sites:
Your children can easily view the site of the
Republican National Committee, but the Democratic
National Committee is blocked. Children can call up
the conservative Constitution Party and Libertarian
Party, both of which are promoting their own U.S.
presidential candidates. But if they attempt to view
Ralph Nader's Green Party or Ross Perot's Reform
Party, they see only a "not appropriate for
children" error.
AOL's "Young Teens" filter, designed for
older children, allows a few more Web sites to be
viewed. The apparent political bias, however,
remains the same:
Sites promoting gun use are available, including
Colt, Browning and the National Rifle Association.
But prominent gun safety organizations are blocked,
including the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, Safer
Guns Now and the Million Mom March.
None of the blocked sites contain depictions of nudity
or even models in swimwear.
"It's not just indecency that AOL is trying to keep
away from children", says Susan Wishnetsky, a
Chicago librarian.
Shame on you AOL! (Couldn’t resist) I’m not concerned about kids ’seeing things’ on the Internet. According to some, there is far ‘worse’ in the public library. Thank goodness for libraries and may they always be uncensored. I’m concerned with people who think that controlling access to information somehow will make people think a certain way, which is of course their way). Sadly, this knows no limitation in regards to political leanings, educational level, income, region, ethnicity, occupation, age, gender, whatever. Some folks think that other people can’t be trusted and I’ve always thought that that was because they knew that they couldn’t be trusted themselves. Parents have to be a part of their children’s lives and take the active part in their acculturation/enculturation and formation of their value system. I should probably say ‘first value system’ because if you’ve taught them that they are intelligent, reasoning beings they will experiment. As well they should. For a time its your job to bug your parents. Its just how it has come to be in this culture of cowboy ‘individualism’. Of which the signs of that individualism are marketd via the corporate mass media.
I have faith that children will come to reasonable, tolerant assumptions about the world and their place and role in it as they mature. Which probably happens by age 25 or so. Probably later if you’re an average male in this culture. But only if they have been allowed to mature during their childhood by loving, caring adults. Which means that we have to be mature as well. I only hope I’m ‘mature’ enough to accept that whatever my kids decide will probably be different from the decision I would make. I did the same with my parents, as they did with their parents. There are no extenuating circumstances here. If I had done ‘the smart thing’ I’d be an accountant or a MBA type. That’s what my mom wanted to be and passed along to me as her vision for me. I’d be just as outraged if the conservative sites were blocked and only Greenpeace, the Environmental Defense Fund, Planned Parenthood, and other ‘liberal’ information sources. Information wants to be free.
You know, sex isn’t bad or ‘dirty’. Its just sex. It all depends on how we view it and direct it, individually and as a group (culture). Sex gets weird when we’re obsessed with it. Killing people is pathological. People should be outraged by the content of most TV shoes and movies and rush their children away from the sight. Not from a glimpse of a woman’s nipple. When your default reaction to stress and conflict is violence, threats of violence, or suppressed urges to be violent, those are warning signs.
And that is enough for today….
13:00 PDT
[Reuters] "South African scientist makes dramatic apeman find." "The 1.5 million to two million-year-old skull was found in a previously unreported site a few kilometres (miles) from the renowned Sterkfontein Caves north of Johannesburg, where the most complete arm and hand of an apeman dating back 3.3 million years." The fossil is not in the line of direct human ancestry, as we currently have the clade mapped. ‘Apeman’? I know journalists dumb down science stories but puhlease.
[Las Vegas Murder Trial] KVBC-TV in Las Vegas has a live webcast of the Sandy Murphy and Rick Tabish murder trial. It is being broadcast free of talking head commentary. The two are accused of murdering Las Vegas casino heir Ted Binion on Sept. 17, 1998. This will be a made for TV movie you realize. It has all the ingredients, a millionaire heir to casino empire addicted to heroin takes in a stripper, the heir is found dead hours after he removes her from his will and the stripper’s boyfriend is apprehended trying to remove bars of silver from the heir’s hidden vault in the desert west of town. As long as they don’t cast Julia Roberts to play Murphy … these people are the typical Las Vegas thick-headded thugs, except one has a boob job.
On another tangent, I’m convinced that Las Vegas is the Mos Eisley of our parallel universe. "A more wretched hive of scum and villainy …" We need to be careful as we search for Obi-Wan.
09:50 PDT
Cybernetic tofu weasels somewhere in northern California gnawed through the Pac-Bell T1 causing an outage from approximately 10:45 am yesterday until around 6 am today. We’re are back now.
I really miss not being able to weblog - "you don’t miss your water, ’till your well runs dry".
this is what I was going to post yesterday, more will come later today
4/24/2000 12:30 PDT
Can’t connect, Can’t check email. OK, I can once in a while, but its not predictable. The real problem is that the service is not DEPENDABLE. That’s not too much to ask from a provider of services.
[new Warp Core by John Martellaro] What are the X languages one needs to know, in the year 2000, to be competitive in the marketplace? "In other words, where is the action? It turns out, I believe, that X = 4. Here they are, in the order you should learn them."
OK, a rant is back. Its not the original one but the same intent is here. What ISPs there in Las Vegas are in sore need of competition because, as a user I have few options. If I were trying to provide business services I’d be sunk. If I were a entrepreneur who wanted to move the internet for a web presence I’d be sunk unless I wanted to hand over the back end to someone out of state. (What state? Duhhhhhh, go West young man.)
But I’m just talking about being a reasonably competent end user. I just want to plug in my little home LAN and go… For a long time I had CompuServe on my Mac Plus. This was back when 2400 baud was a shiny object of desire. Then came AOL, but I wanted to get out to this Internet I had heard of. There were ftp sites out there with astronomical pictures from NASA and gopher sites that all kinds of resources, but I had to rely on the kindness of scientists, researchers, and students to upload to upload things to AOL. Then in 1991 I got my first shell account and got introduced to Unix. SunOS we’d call it now. At the same time I reentered the research community and suddenly in 1992 had a Sun Sparc5 on my desk at work. Finally, I could see what was going on out there. As POP clients began to appear for mere mortals (I was a beta tester at the university) things got better at home, but it was still mostly 14.4 over the modem. I wanted faster at home. I saw the way things just happened over my work connection. Move a file north to Reno <BAMPH> it just happened. From home though, it was a very different matter. I went through several different ISPs here in town, though I always kept the university connection because, well, it just worked,
The first ISP was really in Denver but they had some sort of local Point of Presence. It started out OK, it wasn’t as fast as the school connection, but it offered the chance to offer doing web pages for hire. This wasn’t too bad in 1994, though most folks who wanted web pages were technically savvy enough to do themselves. We weren’t, as Jack Rickard, the founder and former owner of Boardwatch once called "connecting Grandma", and since people weren’t online to buy, there wasn’t much call for web page designers locally. No matter, the DNS service was unreliable and the whole service was just slow. I went through a succession of five of the local providers. The service wasn’t too bad if you were online at 3 AM, but at 7:30 in the evening (assuming you could connect) it was glacial. Ping times were horrible, I didn’t last long with those services. When cable modems were announced I was ecstatic. I knew people who moved just to get in the neighborhoods where the service was being rolled out first. Finally, it was in our neighborhood and we were among the first to sign up. They promised (and still do) "512 kbps" but even when we were almost alone on our node I never got above 56 kbps directly from their servers, using their test pages. Those test pages have long since disappeared by the way. They won’t give you any ammunition to use against them. So what can I do, there is DSL, which is slowly being rolled out but we’re too far away from a switch. Some reports would imply that DSL might not quite be a prime-time event yet. There are other cable companies too, but there is a geographic territory for each of the providers, so yes, technically there is competition, but the reality is where you live determines your connectivity options. To change providers you would have to sell your house and move.
I leave the machines on 24/7, with a hub between the LAN and the cable, with the mailer set to check hourly. I know it should be a switch, but they have only recently become affordable for us. For the last two weeks, 11 out of 14 nights the mail server has crashed during the night and I’ve greeted with a log of ‘unable to connect’s starting about 2 AM. When I’m gone during the day, like at work, it fails again, at about 10AM. That’s been 10 out of 10 days at work. Sometimes I can just force a renewal of the DHCP lease and we’re fine, but six out of the last nine days the lease wouldn’t renew. Pings eventually time out and traceroutes won’t get past ‘localhost’. In these situations a hard reboot doesn’t help, though the cable modem status lights say everything is fine. I have no options as far as I’m concerned. Tech support has said (when I can get through) some variant of ‘Yeah, we’re having problems on the busy nodes, the senior techs are on it’. We have several web pages on their servers, most of them relate to my wife’s graduate program. Its a distance learning Master’s program and as a part of the curriculum she posts the results of her research online so the instructor, and now her committee, can see things as they’re progressing. Though she has never gotten more that a "your site’s hard to get to sometimes" comment from her advisor, I’ve had several people email me about not being able to get through. These are all symptoms of out of control growth like the Wall Street Journal wrote about. Calling so much usage an embarrassment of riches is typical of the financial press which I think is trying to put a good spin on earnings potential, rather than unresponsive service. At the least, a little head-up email about ‘we’ve experienced so much growth, please wait while we catch up’ sort of message would be appropriate.
We’ve gotten to the point now where we want to register some domains, both personal and for a growing business, but can’t find any options for running a back end of our own, much less setting up our own servers locally. Why would I want to go with someone who can’t provide standard service? These are the same guys that swore that there was nothing wrong on their end in terms of me sharing a printer over ether net locally for six weeks then quietly changed the very setting several people (Apple, Asanté and Hewlett-Packard tech support) had said must be incorrect. They didn’t even follow up with the documented incidents to say ‘try it now’. Personally, I think they’re holding on for dear life, just in a little bit over their heads. I have too many friends with Master’s in Computer Science that get their connectivity out of town and know about the situation here in Las Vegas to think otherwise.
The university used to be a bright spot, but there was a big shakeup a couple of years ago, you probably heard about some of the collegiate sports end of it. Lots of the Administration left under various circumstances and there were lots of reorganization. The Computer Science Department was taken out of the loop in terms of providing campus wide services and a new group was created to serve the faculty, staff and students that were not part of Computer Sciences and Engineering. ‘Enterprise Services’ like Lotus Notes became primary and the campus ’standardized’.I wasn’t able to access my account for several months (only the POP client) during the change over because I didn’t have an ‘approved client’. It turns out I wasn’t running the approved OS (three guesses). All the staff that were computer science graduates were forced out in a political power play and Novell and MSCE folks took their place. A system-wide deal was made for for our backbone connectivity too. I don’t know who we were with, but we moved to SPRINT and things have never been the same. I should probably say that I’m much more platform agnostic these days than I was, say four years ago, but I’m still not implementation agnostic. I watched the computing costs increase by a factor of 14 in the contract arm of the university system where I worked, and watched the department I was in at school suddenly not be able to afford to make xerox copies for classes because new support fees decimated the department budget. The Computer Science and Engineering departments still handle their own affairs. The two professors I know over there just say ‘I hear there’s lots of dissatisfaction with how things are now’. When I’ve asked what they’re doing over there I was told ‘we pick up some Alphas and Sun boxes, we’re doing fine’. Could be spin on their part, but somehow I doubt it.
If someone were to provide some options to consumers and businesses it would be a good thing. Right now, we’re just part of somebody’s pie chart for ‘projected ongoing revenues’. When you have no choices what can you do?
Thanks to all who made it look so easy from our end and on such short notice. I know it wasn’t effortless. The outages should be over. Thanks!
