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Okay, we all hate ads. Animated banner ads are a shameless attempt to burn a little ad-shaped hole in your brain, dumping their talentless, artless ad copy right down your optic nerve and into your delicate brain. But let's face it, a lot of websites which could not ordinarily afford to exist are paid for in this manner.

Also, for those who remember the web before search engines, you know, in that supposed golden age, you couldn't FIND anything. I mean, it usually looked like there wasn't that much content out there, but I doubt that was ever true, at least once the universities started taking it seriously, well ahead of everyone else. You could have a good time browsing around, but if you wanted information on a specific topic you had to get lucky, or follow an awful lot of links.

Let's especially not forget the fact that google caches things, so as long as people put their information in ordinary HTML (A trend which is becoming less and less common these days) google will hang onto the data for some time, making the web more persistent.

Sure, commercialization hurts, but someone has to pay for all this bandwidth, all these sites, the hosting... Suck it up. Enjoy the fact that all you have to pay for is your connection. It's worth remembering that access outside of a university or corporation used to be hellishly expensive. Compu$erve charged by the minute, and didn't even have internet access for the longest time, though there was internet mail.

So it's cheaper and faster today than it's ever been. There's more content, useful and not, and more search engines (though google is the only one I use any more, since they're least offensive and most useful) to find information inside of it. Sure, the fact that any asshole can put together a webpage means there's more useless crap, but it also means you have access to data you wouldn't otherwise see.

And for those who cannot find anything to read on the web: Become involved in a community site. Slashdot is just one example, and perhaps not the best, because it's (ostensibly) news-driven. That, plus a blip on the radar every time Katz squats and squeezes out another pearl. But there are sites like Everything2 which can keep you busy for many hours if you're possessed of the necessary pedanticism. Hell, even livejournal can hold your interest.

In general, whiners need to spend their time developing content. I like E2 because it's a resource which can help people well into the future, and which helps me now. I also develop my own content; I run one of the larger drinking game sites on the internet (hyperlogos.org) which I should really spend more time on, but I'm too busy putting work into E2 :)

More pages, more search engines, more content, faster connections. When I started using webpages, modems were the standard, and MANY MANY sites were on nothing faster than a 28.8k modem, including The Circus where I lived - And we had a Class C from scruz.net at the time. :)

I notice now that my link to Hormel Foods Corporation vs. Jim Henson Productions Inc. (the opinion in a lawsuit) is now dead. Anyone got a good link?

Mike

Long ago, there was an article on Slashdot about a free, high quality online university subsidized by Michael Saylor of Microstrategy. This was the missing link. There are already a few good free sources of information out there (Project Gutenberg, The Baen Library), but a comprehensive educational program available for free would provide a much more "equal opportunity." Has anyone heard anything from this, or is it vaporware?

My manager let it slip then asked me to keep quiet about it.

Been through a couple layoffs at Apple. Read about what I think about Apple's management. But don't think I'm still a fan of Be, Inc. - read about what I think we ought to do to all operating systems vendors.

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc

I'm not sure, but I think only citizens of CERN member states can be CERN staff members, and the U.S. is not a member state, but many american universities participate in CERN experiments and so you can go as a staff member of an american university - I did, as an undergraduate student, I did my senior thesis work at UC Santa Cruz at CERN this way.

Physicists have some strange ideas about what constitutes good software practice though. I try to politely correct this in this paper which I wrote for my experiment at CERN, proposing we scrap our FORTRAN codebase and rewrite it in C++.

Geneva's a little expensive to live in but if you work at CERN you can live in either france or Switzerland. (The particles have to show their passports twice each time around the accellerator ring as it crosses the border). I lived in France and found it very affordable.

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc

The basic thesis of the cluetrain manifesto is that carefully controlled corporate communications are basically hopeless in the age of the internet, because information is readily available to anyone and anyone can publish it.

For an example of this, see my own cluetraining on the subject of high-tech headhunters at GoingWare's Policy on Recruiters and Headhunters.

Another (old) example is an ironically named one about why I chose not to develop macintosh software anymore after being dicked around too many times by Apple Computer:

I'm worried about my future. That's why I'm a Be developer.

(For those of you who don't know, Be's history has been to screw its developers even harder than Apple.)

Vast numbers of people have their own web pages where they speak out about companies and business practices that they don't like. Do you have any examples? (let's not forget Mr. Sorehands).

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow

There is already a technology that does just that. It is called X-10. I have a friend that has it installed in his house and can control his entire house from a computer. The technology speaks to different items through power cables in the house. You can find the FAQ Here.