Category: Computers/Internet

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Yet another call of “I can’t retrieve email!” Always from Outlook users. If you use Eudora, Netscape – hell, even Outlook Express, you’ll get some sort of error message if it stops working. You can usually solve it by closing the program and starting it up again. But Outlook… Outlook will get into modes where it says it’s connecting, but it will never actually contact the server. Outlook will decide it needs to ask you for your password over and over again. And if you close Outlook, it’s not necessarily gone. Even “Exit and Log Off” doesn’t always do it. No, you have to reboot the %#@! computer. And if you’re lucky, you don’t have to track down the elusive Inbox Repair Tool (which might be in the Start menu. Maybe.)

I swear, if Outlook didn’t have the name Microsoft in front of it, no one would buy it. Maybe the latest version is better, but everything I’ve tried to use or troubleshoot is still just Schedule+ on steroids with email thrown in. Calling Outlook an email program is like calling a big clunky van a race car because you’ve replaced the engine. Outlook Express, for all its rampant security problems, is a much better mail program than its namesake.

Yecch!

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I finally saw Terminator 3 this weekend, and something has been bothering me about the ending (aside from watching the end of the world).

Skynet’s a distributed system. Presumably its intelligence scales along with the number of nodes it has. Those nodes are computers all over the world. Those computers are most concentrated in major cities. Skynet launches a global nuclear attack on those major cities. That wipes out a huge percentage of its own computing nodes. It’s also going to take out huge chunks of the Internet’s infrastructure, leaving many of the remaining nodes disconnected from each other.

In its attempt to wipe out humans, Skynet gave itself a world-class lobotomy.

I don’t know about you, but that just doesn’t sound like a winning strategy to me.

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Two years ago, the company I work for moved to a new office. We used to do most of our domain name registrations through Network Solutions, mainly out of habit from when they were the only registrar, and accounts were of two types:

  1. Contacts. This involved a person or role and contact information.
  2. Domain names. This involved the person or company who registered the domain name, and links to three contacts (admin, technical, and billing).

So I had a contact account for any registrations we did on our clients’ behalf. We moved – again, this was two years ago – and I updated the address.

Network Solutions has restructured their entire account system into something immensely complicated. Somehow this single contact account has been split into three separate accounts, none of which had the password I started with, and all of which had the old address.

Yes, all three redundant accounts showed the address and phone number that I deleted two years ago.

We used to have people lose their domain names (or at least get them put on hold) because they never gave NS their new address when they moved, and they wouldn’t get the renewal notice. I guess these days it doesn’t really matter. Even if you do update your address, they’ll revert it anyway.

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We have a “yours, mine and ours” set of computers at home. My system started out as a Compaq Presario in 1994 and has been upgraded piecemeal over the past decade, Katie replaced her Power Mac with a G4 last year, and we picked up an eMachine to use as a dial-up server when we moved in together. (I was going to cobble something together out of the leftover bits from my computer, but it was cheap and saved me the effort of figuring out what was working and what needed to be replaced. Plus it gave us an extra Windows system.)

I’ve been dual-booting Linux and Windows for about 5 years, and spent most of my last year in college using Linux almost exclusively. (Student housing with Ethernet. Having worked in a college computer lab for several years, I didn’t trust Windows 95 to be safe on the network.) Well, a few months after we got the eMachine, hardware problems corrupted my Windows installation. I didn’t want to “borrow” a Windows 98 install CD, I didn’t want to buy Windows Me (piece of ****), Windows 2000 was too expensive, and I really didn’t want the licensing nightmare that is XP. So I delayed, using Linux exclusively, and eventually came to the conclusion I didn’t need to reinstall Windows at all.

Unfortunately, there are very few commercial games written for Linux. Now I’m not much of a gamer, but I do enjoy RPGs, turn-based strategy, and the occasional FPS, and No Windows meant No Might and Magic. Continue reading →

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I saw this and was absolutely certain CNET’s software had accidentally re-posted an old news article about Gnutella.

A day after developers at America Online’s Nullsoft unit
quietly release file-sharing software,
AOL pulls the link to the product from the subsidiary’s Web site.

As it turns out, Nullsoft did it again, with an encrypted collaboration program called Waste.

Anyone want to take bets on whether its brief posting will be enough for third-party developers to pick it up and run with it?

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I had an email conversation with someone over the last two days, which, in another industry, might have gone something like this:

Customer: “My light won’t turn on.”

Me: “Make sure it’s plugged in.”

Customer: “It still desn’t work.”

Me: “Try changing the bulb.”

Customer: “No, it still doesn’t work.”

…

Customer: “Hey, I plugged it in, and it worked!”

I have to wonder: did this person misread my advice as “make sure it’s unplugged?” Did he simply ignore it? Did he think it meant “check to see whether it’s plugged in, but don’t change the situation one way or the other?”

Why do you call up tech support if you aren’t willing to follow the directions we give you?

The worst part is, he probably thinks he solved it himself and we didn’t help at all.

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