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I've been to 9 of the last 10 and will attend next week. Comdex hit a lull before the dot com boom and then the last two years it's been trying to find it's way again.

This year looked extremely promising with more informative panel discussions and break out sessions.

Don't forget this also affects the other Comdex shows that happen each year. I've only been to Fall Comdex, so I can't speak to the rest, but it will be a loss to the industry if it fades away.

Many people have spoken about virtual trade shows, but you don't get to try the products out and meet the folks to help support those products.

Comdex 2001 Overview

A good article with insight on the economics of RPGS.

The author says, "Players - in contravention of the game's rules - also trade in EverQuest paraphernalia and characters offline. The online auction Web site, eBay, is flooded with them and people pay real money - sometimes up to a thousand dollars - for avatars and their possessions. Auxiliary and surrogate industries sprang around EverQuest and its ilk. There are, for instance, "macroing" programs that emulate the actions of a real-life player - a no-no."

A group called Collective Good will take your cell phones and recycle them. Not only do developing nations get phones, but the people who refurbish them are trained. An interview with Seth Heine the founder of the group, explains a little more.

It's a way to give back that doesn't hurt you or cost you anything.

A Wired article touched on this previously.

The neat thing are the carbon nanotubes used to drive these things. NEC is working on fuel cells for phones.

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Interview with GoDaddy President Bob Parsons

As the dotcom boom hits bottom you look around and notice that fewer and fewer services have competitors anymore. That's the way it has become in on-line payments. There are a couple of alternatives that may still unseat PayPal as the major player in the space, but now that eBay has them I doubt it.

Low barrier of entry means this and the auction space are ripe, but getting traction in it is hard.

What concerns me the most is the service aspect of the deal. PayPal has a bad reputation, but there is hope it will it will improve.

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Go Daddy President Interview

Book Review of Building Java Enterprise Applications Vol. 1 Architecture

"Before you dive into the coding, read this book to summarize and organize your overall design and implementation. It will be well worth your time. I'm looking forward to seeing the rest of the volumes in this series."

ISPs on Anti Spam Hunt

MAPS Attack

Getting tired of the Slashdot effect, I threw up the main article and pics. The benchmarks aren't there, but the meat of the article and hardware pics are up there.

You can find them here.

A good article about today's RPG Economics inside the fantasy worlds.

It's amazing to think that a few people designed a system so well working that it's served as the basis for countless types in the genre.

... with the bath water is one of the problems in fighting spam.

I use Mail Washer as a pre-processor for my email accounts. It has now turned out to take more time to weed out legitimate messages.

More and more of my legitimate email from distro lists I have subscribed to from cNet, Woody's Windows Watch and even obscure lists such as Amusing Facts Daily now show up in the ORBD and other spam lists it consults.

For instance, just coming back from vacation I had 1200 messages across five accounts. 70% were tagged as spam from a spam list. 20% of those were legitimate distro lists.

The independent spam lists do a good job of catching most of the spam, but it also catches too many legitimate lists. I try to send an email to the list admin letting them know, but typically they respond that it's not worth the effort trying to get off the lists.

I've gone through a something just like it where I was Mudrered Electronically by my ISP.

This site talks about what happens when a legitimate company gets on the list.

The US Patent Trademark Office is supposed to promote the industrial and technological progress of the nation and strengthen the economy. I do not see how allowing an obtuse corporate microsalesman to stifle an 11 year old freely distributed world standard is in the best interest of our nation.

Reminds me of the compression war of '88.

"Back then people compressed the files with a program called ARC by Systems Enhancements Associates (SEA).
ARC would take the original files and compress them into one file with the extension of ARC. When you downloaded this file from the BBS you unarced it by using ARC.EXE. This was great until a gentleman named Phil Katz came up with the idea of improving ARC.

See, Phil found out you could speed the compression process and even make the files more compressed. Instead of one file for compression and decompression, Phil made two. The result was PKARC for compression and PKXARC for decompression. This is where the fun began.

SEA got really ticked that Phil had done a better job of compression and decompression while maintaining compatibility. In the great American way, instead of competing and making ARC better, they sued. ...
A few months later, PKZIP was released and that was it. I can't find a Systems Enhancement Associates website, but PKWare is still in business. Sysops dropped almost every other compression type and went with ZIP and as they say, that is history."

So go ahead "Forgent Networks". We'll find a better format.

We miss ya Phil.

http://www.compunotes.com/OpinionSection/philkatzr em.htm

The Correct Link

Sig: CompuNotes Rocks what else should I say?

Opening paragraph:

"This book discusses some design patterns and their issues and solutions for Java programming. The author uses VisualAge for Java, Websphere and DB2 as his tools, but the principles can be applied to any Java project. The codes are developed with JDK 1.2.2. Some, but not all, of them have been compiled, but not tested, in JDK 1.3.1. The author uses the term "antipattern" for a flaw in design. In addition, he attempts to have a unique descriptive term for each antipattern. If you jump from one chapter to another without specific order, you might be puzzled by all the new terms. Fortunately, the book has a good index on the keywords and the pages they are described."

URL: Bitter Java Review