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The Lemon lists in 1990:

First ISP created. Business is slow due to the fact that the Internet has no purpose, nobody knows about it, and more people own Betamax machines than computers.

Hobbe's lists:

1990:

The World comes on-line (world.std.com), becoming the first commercial provider of Internet dial-up access

UUnet started in 1987 and Netcom started in 1998.

The Internet wasn't offically cleared for commercial use until 1990 and I believe Software Tool & Die did some of the pushing and received some of the backlash for commercializing the Internet. But both UUNet and Netcom were around first weren't they? When ARPAnet officially became the commercial "Internet", I believe UUNet changed their name to "Alternet." Netcom kept the same name.

As I recall I got my first Netcom shell account in 1990. I used e-mail, usenet, fsp, and ftp (and archie). Around 1991 or 1992 I think I started using irc. I recall using dipd(?) and later slirp(I think this link is to the same program, just a newer version) to turn my shell account into a slip/ppp account, but I didn't really start doing that until the Web came out as there wasn't much point prior.

Netcom was bought out by ICG, then Mindspring bought it from ICG, then Earthlink bought out Mindspring.

I lost Netcom my shell account around 1994, but some people still have their original 1988 @netcom.com e-mail address still maintained by Earthlink.

Actually, the Japanese had similar oxygen destroying technology since 1954, unfortunately, the discoverer Dr. Serizawa chose to commit suicide rather than risk having the technology made into a weapon. The technology was rediscovered in the 1990s, unfortunately, the manner in which it was re-revealed to the world led to unfavorable publicity. Only now has the furor died down enough for oxygen destroying technology to finally realize its potential.

I wrote an essay about Language Holy Wars a while ago which, perhaps, you might find interesting. It's over here.

Personally, I find it nothing short of terrifying that C is still used as much as it is. When you're dealing with hard realtime constraints, or an embedded system which barely has a bit of memory to spare, etc., then I can see it... but otherwise, for God's sake, use something appropriate to the problem set.

Personally, I love LISP. If only there were good UNIX API bindings for it, and a good graphical toolkit...

Way to go Earthlink! If I was interested in dialup, this would be a big selling point for me.

Way to go Earthlink! If I was interested in dialup, this would be a big selling point for me.

you too can enjoy it. heh.

I've used Earthlink as an ISP for going on 6 years now, and I must say, I've never dealt with better. For one thing, in the years that I've had my earthlink address, I'd say I never get more than 3 or 4 spams per week. What is my secret? For starters, if I need to provide an e-mail address for something that may result in unsolicited messages, I use one of the free webmail providers (Hotmail, Yahoo!, etc.) I can check those to confirm what I wanted, then never check it again, and my Outlook (with my primary e-mail) doesn't fill up with useless crap.

Another way to stop the spam before it starts is to keep your e-mail address from getting on those lists in the first place. When posting to Usenet, BBSes, forums, even Slashdot, use some sort of clever cloaking (Slashcode does this already), or even a fake email. Encryption for e-mail such as using a free personal certificate from Thawte or a GPL encryption such as GNU Privacy Guard is always a good idea.

In addition, Earthlink's Spaminator is a Godsend. With that baby enabled, I'm lucky if I get one spam a month. Case in point: my mother has an Earthlink address that she uses for her business contact. She complained that she's getting hundreds of porn spam and "enlarge your penis"-type e-mails (no idea how these got here.) Setting up a few Outlook Express filters and enabling Spaminator cut the dirty messages by about 90%, and she is grateful she no longer has to wade through such filth to get to her real mesages.

The bottom line is, the fewer spammers that have your address, the fewer spams you're gonna get. I have a Hotmail that gets 1000+ spams a day. My real e-mails get next to none. It's just like telemarketers, they get your number from companies who need a contact info for whatever reason. However, Hotmail address are free, whereas extra phone numbers to give the telemarketers, and then never answer, are not. Well, we do have Caller-ID for that, but that's another post...

The challenge-response system will be optional and free for EarthLink subscribers

If you don't specifically turn it on, you won't have to use it. The setting will probably live on the user's account page at Earthlink Support, alongside the existing option to enable the current "spamguard" system (which is also turned off by default).

This type of system is probably best reserved for a public email account (ie: listed on a web page / business card) - not one used for shopping online or emailing family.

It will not "destroy the intarnet" overnight.

Ironically, AOL is delaying email from Earthlink members...seems a little funny that they might complain about positive efforts to control spam...

Members may see delays in mail being received by AOL members

OK. This comes up every so often, but it must be clarified. Technically, a well cared for record is better quality than a CD. Why? Because sampling "simplifies" a recorded analog waveform. I don't have time to go into too much detail, but read this if you need to know more. Just because records are old tech doesn't mean they suck.

Quoth MvdB:
"It doesn't matter at all if the design of the keyboard is over 100 years old."

I agree. But the problem is that the QWERTY keyboard was designed to solve a technical problem of over a century ago that no longer exists. That is, there is no good technical reason to have maintained the QWERTY arrangement...
The QWERTY keyboard was designed in the days of those mechanical typewriters where each key was attached to a lever that would strike the page through an ink ribbon, leaving the appropriate character on the page. If you've ever typed on one of those, you know it's not hard to hit one key and then hit another one too soon after hitting the first one and have the two levers jam together. If you weren't using a QWERTY keyboard, this would be even worse. The QWERTY keyboard was designed to minimize jams of this type.
References:
QWERTY Ref 1
and
QWERTY Ref 2
By the 1970s, there were already good electric typewriters (they may have come sooner, but that's when I remember seeing them) using a single ball with all the characters, avoiding the jamming lever problem completely by reducing the number of parts that have to strike the page to one. There was no longer any technical reason to maintain the QWERTY layout. The introduction of word processors and personal computers also represented chances to use more efficient keyboard layouts.
That said, there are many millions of people who have learned to type, whether through formal training (like my mom) or through natural evolution of "hunt and peck" (like me), using the QWERTY keyboard. I personally have typed this entire message without looking once at the keyboard. I use most of my fingers and I don't need to look at the keyboard. I can even continue typing--to finish a sentence, for example-- while I turn and talk to a coworker. This horrifies some of my coworkers.
My guess (and yes, I admit it's just a guess) is that increases in efficiency (Words per Minute, for example) would for most users be offset by the need to learn a new keyboard and the fact that a QWERTY-trained user would be completely lost trying to use a new keyboard layout, which could create a lot of problems.
On the other hand, there may be significant ergonomic benefits available from more efficient designs. I haven't enough knowledge of the field to even express an opinion one way or the other on that, much less weigh any possible ergonomic benefits against the time required to train a user on a new layout (no problem for new users) and against the problems the existence of multiple layouts would cause.
Maybe the new technologies that allow a computer case to change color can eventually lead to a way out of this-- imagine keys that change depending on which keyboard layout you've selected. You'd be restricted to a keyboard in the same shape, with the same key positions (unless you used a flat "keypad" with no keys... yuck!), but the identities of the keys would be different depending on the selection of a layout.
With such a keyboard, it would be possible to introduce more efficient layouts for new users and interested QWERTY-trained users, while still permitting QWERTY users to use their training and/or experience using that layout.

--Mark

If it's any consolation, that kind of 'screw with the customer' mentality gets things in the Windows market as well. A good example of it would be 'Emperor of the Fading Suns'. Built by Hollistic Design, Inc. and marketed through Sega, Sega decided that they didn't feel like waiting for the completed product and released the Beta 2 version... complete with flaws in the AI and incomplete unit lists and installation issues that left a lot of folks tearing their hair out. Sega's 'official' response was to let people eat static, showing exactly what they thought of the consumers buying their product.

Years after it was 'cancelled', there were still independant groups doing AI retools and mod packs for it; Hyperion, Reality, Roman Empire, and Nova were the big ones. Some haven't updated in quite a while now (Nova in '99 and Hyperion in '01), but Reality was still active in '02.

Another case of some nitwit deskjockey putting a worthwhile project into crash-and-burn mode. It's a damned shame that the companies don't learn anything from these disasters. I wonder how many more potentially great games will be obliterated like this... :/

If you want to build complex systems fast, nobody is going to turn to LISP for a solution. There isn't one. LISP is a beautiful language which I think any programmer would benefit to learn, but its not a language to get things done with.

LISP is a powerful and interesting language and as a language has its merits. I don't mean to pick on LISP.

What irks me is not that Paul Graham is saying this, but that he might get listened to

Oh really? Then what do you call these?

http://home.earthlink.net/~josephpate/_images/Glob al_Comp_Opera.jpg

http://home.earthlink.net/~josephpate/_images/Glob al_Comp_IE.jpg

Warning, both of these pictures are 210 kilobytes.

Oh really? Then what do you call these?

http://home.earthlink.net/~josephpate/_images/Glob al_Comp_Opera.jpg

http://home.earthlink.net/~josephpate/_images/Glob al_Comp_IE.jpg

Warning, both of these pictures are 210 kilobytes.

if you want to be lean, you actually have to weigh MORE,
since lean strong muscles weigh more than fat, but they
look more toned.

therefore, using weight to guage fitness is totally bogus.
a lean person will look 'skinnier' but weigh MORE.

the other thing that makes people fat is 'Low Fat' food.
if all you eat is low-fat stuff, your body never gets the
nutrition it needs, and hence you have to eat more of
the stuff to make up your body's requirements. the best
thing to do if you want to lose weight is to eat more
of the 'Regular Fat' foods, and then your body won't
need so much of the stuff to feel 'full'.

best regards,
john

You can if you're a business user, and if Congress hadn't prevented state public utility commissions from regulating DSL providers, you'd probably have it for home DSL.

The big corporate ones, targetted mostly at home users, although some do have business customers as well. They're the ones likely to introduce those weird clauses in their TOS, or to provide poor service because they're big and they don't care anyway, if some customers leave, they'll get new ones who have seen the TV ads or picked up a CD at Walmart. A lot of those ISPs originate from their country's phone company too.

The latter ought to be evil, after all it was founded by a Hubbardist, but it does at least make an effort to provide a basic service with as few catches as possible. I'm using their DSL service at the moment and was surprised and rather happy to see nothing about servers, use of non-Windows machines, NAT, etc, in their contracts, beyond a basic "We will not provide customer support if you're using anything other than [list configurations here]".

Demon, if anything, are even better though from conversations with friends back in Britain, they're suffering a little because of British Telecom's desire to try and make DSL as unattractive as possible to anyone who wants to do more than look at web pages. Demon themselves continue to provide an "anything goes, you're responsible" approach, despite being purchased by Thus a few years ago, a telecoms company whose reputation is considerably poorer than Britain's original ISP.

It's genuinely worth looking around for the "original" ISPs and seeing what they offer. Quite often, they're still trying to do what they were originally.

• 
  
• D+T 13.6 keV
  
• D+D 15 keV
  
• D+He3 58 keV
  
• p+Li6 66 keV
  
• p+B11 123 keV
  

top 12 best movies:

1 - baraka
2 - wings of desire
3 - faraway so close
4 - the navigator a medieval odyssey
5 - adventures of the baron munchausen
6 - picnic at hanging rock (wim wenders)
7 - la double vie de veronique
8 - the yellow submarine
9 - prospero's books
10 - howard's end
11 - the field
12 - betty blue

cheers!
john

For all the people here complaining about Iraqi TV violating the Geneva Convention and criticizing Al Jazeerah for airing that footage, please remember your government has similar skeletons in its closet (if not worse). As the linked article states, the spread of that documentary has pretty much been blocked in the US by your media. The Bush administration even tried to get the German government not to air it in Germany. This administration just takes the term hypocrisy to a new level. Is it any wonder why Bush felt the need to not participate in any International Crimes Court? If they don't have anything to be afraid of then why object to this?

According to their faq, it delivers speeds 'up to 5 times faster' than standard service. Unless they're retarding the standard service, I'm not sure how they're going to further compress a graphic. They sounds like they are eliminating some TCP/IP negotiation by maintaining connections, but then I sped up my TCP/IP negotiations by switching off of IE.

That was my first question, of course.
From Earthlink's FAQ:

What are the minimum system requirements for EarthLink Accelerator?
EarthLink Accelerator works with most Microsoft® Windows(TM)-based personal computers in use today, including virtually all PCs purchased within the last 4 years.

Platforms
Windows 98/NT 4.0/2000/ME/XP

Browsers
IE 5.0 or later
Netscape 4.7 or later
MSN Explorer

Is EarthLink Accelerator available for Macintosh?
Not at this time.

usually novels that describe the Future,
are really about the PRESENT.

but the sci-fi setting allows you to look at
the IDEA in a situation without all the culturally
biased baggage that would inhabit a novel
with the same ideas set in a present that
too much resembled our own.

cheers,
john.

dear mr. stallman,

thank you -- for giving the required thought and persistence to discover and implement a practical working example of the open-source idea. your actions and ideals are an inspiration for many!

to presume the free sharing and replication of ideas in code,
and codifying that into the GNU license, you have done a great
portion of humanity a great service, and i just wanted to thank you
personally for that.

best regards, and many more,

john penner (toronto).

social threefolding

Add these guys to the list, if you please:

http://www.see-thruwindows.com
seethruwindo@earthlink.net
(877) 733-8478

These guys are real cocksucker telemarketers in the DC area that refuse to honor requests to be added to their do-not-call list. I'm pretty close to the point of recording my inbound calls so I have evidence against them, but it's nice to kick them in the nuts under the table too.

The qwerty keyboard went through some interesting rumours and competition... this site is entertaining if only for the pages on antique typewrites (i own an early Smith-Corona)and the "dispelling of myths behind qwerty keyboards."

Net Speed Record Smashed
Posted by
CowboyNeal
in The Mysterious Future!

from the fast-ethernet-not-so-fast-anymore dept.
BrianWCarver writes "The BBC is reporting that scientists have set a new internet speed record by transferring 6.7 gigabytes of data (the equivalent of 4 hours of DVD-quality movies) across 10,978 kilometres (6,800 miles), from Sunnyvale in the US to Amsterdam in Holland, in less than one minute. Average speed: more than 923 megabits per second, or more than 3,500 times faster than a typical home broadband connection. The data was sent across the Internet2 network. Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (Slac) Computer Services participated in the record-breaking event. Slac has an interest in such high-speed transfers as they have accumulated the largest known database in the world, which grows at one terabyte per day."

I found my answer: IPF FreeBSD FAQ

Stuff to play with tonight. :)

If you're on an earthlink account, you should be using spaminator.

I've been pretty much spam-free since I activated it for my account. Good luck!

--K.

The first shuttles cost $1.7 billion apiece; Endeavour cost $2.1 billion because long-abandoned fabrication plants had to be reactivated.

Each shuttle flight cost $450 million.

Back in '93 on the Compu$erve Aviation Week forum, some smart Johnny pointed out that if you took the total Space Shuttle budget from 1977-1993 and divided it by the flights over that same time period, you came up with an amortized flight cost of $1 billion per flight.

The Space Shuttle was never reusable. After every flight, it was essentially stripped down to parts and rebuilt. Main engines which were meant for 27,000 seconds of operation were doing well to get a tenth of that.

So could we please stop spreading this silly meme about the Shuttle being "reusable"? It's not. Never was.

In the end, the Shuttle has proven to be disposable. Unfortunately, the lives lost with each disposable Shuttle aren't.

See my full rant about the Shuttle here.

Mormonism: religion -> science fiction

Yep, between Orson Scott Card and the producer of Battlestar Galactica and a host of others Mormons are capable of writing science fiction.

You might appreciate this interview with OSC on Religion, Science Fiction, and Fantasy. It hits the nail on the head.

------------------
OnRoad: Hit the Road.

The real question is, will the new version have all of the thinly disguised mormon doctrine like the original did?

See http://www.proaxis.com/~sherlockfam/art5.html or http://home.earthlink.net/~billotto/Mormon_N_BSG.h tml or http://www.lib.msu.edu/lorenze1/bg.htm
or anywhere else you can google up from "battlestar galactica" and "mormon".

Above link is incorrect: The Blubber Layered User Interface

About 2 years ago an Ariane 5 rocket malfunctioned and left a very expensive Artemis satellite in an unusable orbit. Well, over the course of 18 months, the European Space Agency actually managed to push the satellite into a usable orbit using measly 15mN ion thrusters!

Damn. It's obvious that Planetary's efforts on behalf of mankind have been negated yet again...

"Why do I even have to say this? Why do I have to say
'Get off the unique and probably alien plinth that zaps the
unwary?' What is wrong with my life that I have to say
these things out loud to someone?"

- Jakita Wagner, Planetary #4

About 2 years ago an Ariane 5 rocket malfunctioned and left a very expensive Artemis satellite in an unusable orbit. Well, over the course of 18 months, the European Space Agency actually managed to push the satellite into a usable orbit using measly 15mN ion thrusters!

Damn. It's obvious that Planetary's efforts on behalf of mankind have been negated yet again...

"Why do I even have to say this? Why do I have to say
'Get off the unique and probably alien plinth that zaps the
unwary?' What is wrong with my life that I have to say
these things out loud to someone?"

- Jakita Wagner, Planetary #4

How long will Humans keep Thinking
they came from Monkeys...?

Maybe the Monkeys came from Us?

john

Bet ya can't guess what my name is. Anyway, I decided to go and see who else has my name. I found:

The International Eric Jacobsen Page
Eric.Com
The Eric Conspiracy Secret Labs (member example)

I could care less who has my name. We're each as original as the next one with our name. I don't think it's that much of a big deal, really.

Find a do-it-yourself manual here (or Google for irreproducible+atomic+bomb)

EarthLink does have issues with turning some profits but losses are very low, and they added 52 million dollars in cash to the bank, bringing their cash position to over a half a billion dollars.

Additionally, EarthLink is aggressively pursuing in 2003 the "value" $10 dial-up business by offering services thru its recently acquired PeoplePC subsidiary, which is guna put a lot of lethal pressue on United Online which offers spam-ridden, windows-only service thru custom dial-up/networking software which basically takes over your tcp/ip stack.

EarthLink is by far the most diversified ISP in the United States. AOL and MSN are doomed dinosaurs stuck in the dial-up age, scrambling for their lives trying to land broadband deals with telcos a whole TWO YEARS behind their fiercest competitors.

EarthLink does have issues with turning some profits but losses are very low, and they added 52 million dollars in cash to the bank, bringing their cash position to over a half a billion dollars.

Additionally, EarthLink is aggressively pursuing in 2003 the "value" $10 dial-up business by offering services thru its recently acquired PeoplePC subsidiary, which is guna put a lot of lethal pressue on United Online which offers spam-ridden, windows-only service thru custom dial-up/networking software which basically takes over your tcp/ip stack.

EarthLink is by far the most diversified ISP in the United States. AOL and MSN are doomed dinosaurs stuck in the dial-up age, scrambling for their lives trying to land broadband deals with telcos a whole TWO YEARS behind their fiercest competitors.

Please mod parent way up. According to the link he posted, the whole Internet Privacy act is a JOKE, yet a crapload of arguably-legal sites appear to be using it. If i was a law enforcement agent, i would search google for "431.322.12" and go on a shopping spree.

I DO!. ;]

I like the duck...

Well, you seem to be REALLY knowledgable on this topic. You seem to know more than what the best anthropologists know on this topic, such as that people NOT of what we call "civilized" cultures had nearly no hierarchies in their societies, had far more leisure time than us, and, in general lived far longer than MOST people of "modern" civilizations.

True, what I know of anthropology come from the wild leaps of faith required by the limited data they have available. One concrete example (which I note your diatribe to lack): Lindow man, as described in Life and Death of a Druid Prince was determined to have been a 'prince' of the druids, sacrificed to the gods in order to remove the Romans from England. "Sacrificed" because he had his throat slit, was strangled, and beat over the head after having eaten some burnt toast.. "Prince" because he had an armband and good teeth. "Remove the Romans" because his death was carbon dated to 50AD +/- 100 years.

Anthropology, as all the social sciences, is too clouded by the biases of the investigator to be used as proof that humanity ever rose above the instinctual me-first desires that drove our biological or social evolution.

when apple put 'classic' compatibility in a box -- the os9 'classic' compatibility ran better than most windows 'upgrades' that were supposed to be compatible.

i can still run software from macOS 6.0.4 in the OS-X 'classic' mode -- macwrite II v1.5, photoshop 3.0 (from 1994 - mac OS 7.6 era), and macpaint 2.0 (from 1988) still runs fine -- mac compatibility is really quite good.

john

microsoft will never do it -- they'll never let go of control of the lowest common denominator (the OS is the last layer between software and the hardware) - they don't want to lose that control, and never will.

because they kept that hood so tightly welded shut -- open source had to arise, because people like to be able to tinker. so -- thank you microsoft! :)

cheers,
john

In fact, there's a great picture at Science@NASA that shows Jupiter, Venus, Mars, and Saturn all in SOHO's field of view. All with the diffraction spikes at the sides of the planets.

More images with diffraction spikes:

The Finding of Comet SOHO 2002 C4
Hot Shots from SOHO - high bandwidth, but great examples showing that the image at the top of the EuroSeti page is almost definitely a comet

Seriously, though. If you are looking for backup utilities, NONAGS has several that might be useful for spanning your disks. I personally use Polder Backup onto a separate drive, backing up only those things which I can't replace (photos, text documents, and music). You could also use CYGWIN to zip / tar your entire drive, then use Chokkin Pettan to segment into CD-sized bites. From personal experience I can tell you that programs other than CYGWIN choke on 5 GB+ files. Maybe a backup drive is in order?

Sweeeeeeet! I'm trying to get a network-access-less (and/or firewall-friendly) install going for Real for some relative-types, but to date have met with limited success. I think that's because there are now several dozen Real codecs, not all of which are bundled in the default player download. (I assume the encoder defaults to the codecs that don't come with the player, thereby forcing player users to download whenever the encoder is lazy :-)

As such, the troj^H^H^H^Hplayer often has to phone home in order to "download updates" - that is, extra .DLLs to add to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Real\Codecs, Plugins, etc. to play the stream or file.

Anyone have a complete list of codecs and their associated .DLLs as of late 2002?

I've tried the RealAtLast approach with some success (once upon a time, I did something similar to get RealG2 playback on RealPlayer 5), but that was a couple of years ago, and I've long since lost track of all the crappy DLLs it wants today. I've downloaded some recently-encoded Futurama and SouthPark episodes for use as guinea pigs with the RealAtLast bundle, but Real still wants to phone home to get at least one missing codec. *grumble*.

> As always, if you have relatives who use RealPlayer, or you maintain it in an office setting, it may be best to perform that procedure on every computer.

Amen. It's a hell of a lot easier to fix it once, and then never have to deal with it again. At least, until the bastards at Real decide to make another codec that has no improvement in video/audio quality, but requires another client-side upgrade. *retch*