Category: Computers

— Kathleen Parker sez: “Two thoughts: Americans have too much time on their hands; the Internet is the new asylum.” Priceless. Link from LGF.

— Because of some snafu at Network Solutions, protein wisdom’s domain, creatical.com, will be untranslateable for a coupla days. Use this handy link for that eminent blog in the meantime.

— Guido van Rossum Awarded the Free Software Foundation Award for the Advancement of Free Software

Brussels, Belgium – Saturday, February 16, 2002 – The Free Software Foundation (FSF) bestowed today its fourth annual FSF Award for the Advancement of Free Software. FSF President and founder, Richard Stallman, presented the award to Guido van Rossum for inventing and implementing as Free Software the Python programming language.

But the boy still has a day job at Zope. Those day jobs can be annoying.

— John Scalzi (mentioned below as “some idiot”) writes in to defend his opinion that blogger stats are inflated. He’s heard of firewalls, and wrote about them in the follow-up to the blogger-bashing article cited by Rebecca Blood. But he doesn’t seem to understand how widespread firewall use is, noting ” numerous small businesses don’t use firewalls.” Funny he should say that. The most popular router for small businesses is the Cisco 7200, a device that I used to write code for. The most requested feature on the 7200 was, guess what, a firewall. Nobody wants to surf the web without one, they’re even in common use in multi-computer homes, as Myria points out in her comments on my original post on this subject.

Scalzi also opines that AOL’s caching of popular pages doesn’t affect IP counts: “I doubt that ‘blog sites, typically modestly visited and with relatively few graphics, are cached frequently by AOL (I worked at AOL for
some time and have some understanding of their caching criteria, so I’m not
entirely pulling this out of my ass.” So let’s pull some data out of our referrer logs since our asses are busy inflating our numbers. In my top ten visitors list, I find three entries that look like this: “cache-rr06.proxy.aol.com.” This looks to me like a visit from AOL’s cache server. Am I wrong? So the bottom line is this: visitor counts are depressed by proxies, firewalls, NAT boxes, and AOL cache servers. They’re inflated by the alleged practice of AOL altering IP addresses in mid-session (do they really do that? It would play hell on routing if they did – AT&T Cable assigns you an IP address once and they never change it.) On the whole, these things clearly weigh in favor of depressed visitor counts, so page views is a better measure of traffic than anything else, and we don’t get page views from print because they can’t be calculated.

Scalzi also tells me that he’s a good buddy of war profiteer and generally disgusting sack of refuse Ted Rall. But in Scalzi’s defense, Bill Quick also says he’s a buddy of Scalzi, so the AOL man can’t be all bad. One degree of separation between Rall and Quick means we live in a strange world, but not one so strange we need it explained by the likes of Rebecca Blood, who remains firmly embedded in the clueless file.

Looking at Scalzi’s and Blood’s websites today, I find Scalzi saying “There is nothing more pathetic than a dad alone with his kid in the early afternoon.” and Blood calling women an “oppressed group.” I rest my case.

— The Mercury News reports that schools are getting their feet a little damp in mobile computing:

Across the nation, schools are taking the radical step of putting portable technology into the hands of children. After years of debate over the use of computers in schools, educators say the new mobility finally will make technology a classroom tool as ordinary as textbooks and paper.

Right, dudes, schools were the main application areas we had in mind when we invented the wireless MAC protocol for the Photonics IR LAN back in the early 90s. Not that we were all that brilliant, since we stole the idea from Alan Kay’s dynabook.

— Newsweek highlights a new diligence among the VC’s: Silicon Valley Reboots

Post-bubble Silicon Valley tries hard to avoid the harebrained excesses that led to dot-bomb disasters. “We’re still doing deals, but now they’re well thought through,” says Accel’s Breyer. For instance, Accel recently took a month’s worth of technical and marketing analysis before funding a wireless play called Woodside Networks. “Two years ago we would have done it in a week,” says Breyer.

Gee, Woodside sounds like a great company, as this article in the Wall St. Journal shows:

Still, some investors are braving the risks to get in early at new companies. For example, the past quarter saw several relatively massive infusions for new companies — often called A-round financings — such as Woodside Networks Inc. and Cedar Point Communications Inc., which raised $20 million and $19 million, respectively.

Todd Dagres, a general partner at Battery Ventures in Wellesley, Mass., which put some of the money into Cedar Point, says the deal was the first new one he had done in more than a year. “I stopped [making new investments] a year ago because you had to take care of the portfolio,” he says. “You had to make sure your companies were in a survivable mode.”

And even though both Cedar Point and Woodside were classified as A-round deals, neither fits the traditional profile of an early venture investment. By one venture rule of thumb, companies get about three rounds of financing, an A-round to fund product design and development, a B-round to fund producing and selling a product on a small scale, and a C-round to expand sales and get to profitability.

But Woodside is hardly just a couple of entrepreneurs and a business plan. The Palo Alto, Calif., company, which is making semiconductors that will help computers and other devices connect to wireless data networks, was founded back in January last year. It raised an initial $8 million from the founders and some tiny venture firms and expects to have product ready for commercial delivery later this year.

I’m glad we have high-quality startups taking wireless LANs forward, but Woodside isn’t one of them. Once again, we have VCs touting things they don’t understand, investing in low-quality deals with poor prospects, and bragging about it. This kind of thing doesn’t help investor confidence in the market.

— I’m not convinced the HP/Compaq merger is a bad idea, as Live from the WTC is. The founder of Compaq was an old boss of mine (who offered me a job as he was starting the company,) I worked as a consultant at HP, with both HP and Compaq as an OEM supplier, and also at Tandem, the HP spin-off that Compaq acquired to get Tandem’s T-Bus (and hasn’t figured out what to do with since the purchase,) so maybe I have some perspective. HP has a country-club culture that needs shaking-up, and Compaq is a good example of where it needs to go. HP has distribution channels and a knowledge of the Big System business that Compaq’s Tandem division needs for some strategic direction. And anything that reunites HP and Tandem has a certain poetic quality that’s pretty compelling, since the Tandem architecture was developed in the HP Labs but never marketed since it was feared that it would make the HP 3000 look too puny.

Some mergers replace weaknesses with strengths, and this one has the potential. They’re going to need a real CEO, however, like Ann Livermore who should have been made CEO when the board bypassed her for Fiorina. Even if HP’s motivation was simply to knock out a PC competitor, that’s not too shabby a reason on its own.

— Welcome to my new ISP. Nothing new to report, other than I’m glad to be off Verio.

Still shaking it down, however.

— Megan McArdle wrote a pithy and insightful column on the MS/Netscape deal for Salon:

Legal observers, however, were not fooled: the antitrust case might be over, but the door was wide open for civil suits. Sure enough, Netscape soon stepped through with a civil filing claiming treble damages — and I happily anticipated at least a few more years of wrangling over technical and economic arcana.

So now another blogger has crossed-over into the ranks of the Working Journalists.