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?
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.
Back at the UCI Artslab one of my co-workers opened a CD-ROM and the disc kept spinning and flew out at him (though it didn’t actually hit him). I was on the other side of the room and just missed seeing it.
Installing a security fix for Internet Exploder, with a few other items, and I see this gauge:
Last I looked, 1.5 was considerably less than half of 9.6. Either their math is really lousy, or they’ve decided to keep the gauge moving even when nothing’s going on.
I remember back in college we had interesting naming schemes for computers. The ICS labs had the Guilder and Florin Macintosh networks with servers Westley and Buttercup. There was also a Solaris network where each machine was named after a Roman emperor, with names like Aurelian, Caligula, Gothicus, Hadrian, Pacatian, Saloninus, Trajan, etc.
The lab I worked at over in the School of the Arts started naming their Windows NT servers after renaissance artists: Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, Donatello… well, that’s what we told them the origin was, anyway! The first SGI box (for 3D modeling) we got we named Trippy, and then when we got several in we started naming them Happy, Sleepy, etc.
Then we got in a whole mess of computers, expanding our NT network from 3 machines to 14. We were trying to come up with a theme to name them, and started in with names like Pepsi, Mountain Dew, etc. I had to leave after we set up the first 3 or 4 of them, and the next morning I received a mass e-mail stating, “The Artslab liquor cabinet is stocked.” The message went on to list the new computers’ names: Absolut, Alize, Bacardi, Baileys, Bombay_Sapphire, Captain_morgan, CuervoGold, Glennfiddich, Jagermeister, Jimbeam, Midori, Remmy_Martin, Seagrams, and Wildturkey. Soon after, we got a pair of Mac G3s and named them BlackLabel and BlueLabel.
The names stayed at least as long as I did, and may be there still. It was funny, though, to get reactions from people – students who had actually used the machines, or faculty and staff opening up Network Neighborhood – as they realized they were all alcoholic drinks!
