Category: Computers

Techno-bloggers have an interesting outlook on stuff; see The Blogger’s Manifesto and its alternate version: Blogger’s Manifesto: “Life is uncensored.” Real Blogger’s Manifesto: “Life is uncensored, but my clients and my Mom may be reading my blog.” There’s more at JOHO the Blog.

according to this article from the archives of the San Jose Metro: Metroactive Features | Cyberporn

The web, as it turns out, is a medium made for porn. It’s private, anonymous and interactive. By migrating to the web, porn tapped an enormous pool of consumers, most of whom seem to be e-porn surfing during work hours, when 70 percent of porn surfing takes place.

While there is no definitive measurement, many analysts agree that men seeking pornographic material account for about 40 percent of the searches conducted on the Internet each day. Since images and video take up so much more bandwidth than, say, email, porn surfers probably consume close to 70 percent of the Internet’s capacity.

These surfers and millions like them changed the fortunes of many Silicon Valley corporations, large and small. Indeed, without porn, the economic miracle of the second half of the 1990s would be much more of a yawner. There would be fewer people on the streets of downtown San Jose and Palo Alto, and fewer swanky restaurants. More homes would still be in the six-figure price range, and commute times would be shorter. Sports figures, not Internet geeks, would appear in beer commercials; the stock market would be table conversation for few people other than brokers or retirees. Bus ads and billboards would again carry water conservation messages, presidential candidates would raise their money in Texas and Hollywood, and Time magazine could go back to covering global warming and international politics.

…which comes as no surprise to anyone with a referer log. But take this article with a grain of sand – the author describes the Cisco 7200 as a “massive” router, which it’s anything but.

may be a myth. Rob Flickenger has his doubts:

It all started last Friday afternoon. We were all buzzing about Cringely and his Passive Repeater. What a fantastic idea! The thought that he got one of these near-urban-legend devices working, on the first try, from up a tree, to low-gain panel antennas in downtown Santa Rosa, without a supporting ground crew (or even so much as a site survey), truly boggled our minds. Especially since it’s been a point of debate in various community group mailing lists for months as to whether such a design is practical at the low power level that client cards put out.

Cringeley has been known to pull a little prank or two in the past, so he may be pulling our collective leg again. Linked from Techno-Blog 802.11b.

I found a cool new toy today, the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. You enter a URL, and it shows you a snapshot of how that URL looked at various points in the past, going back to November or December of 1996. It’s not a complete archive, of course, but it’s close enough; kinda like looking at your old high school yearbook.

are a lot more interesting than without. I set up season passes on each of the NBC channels (local, CNBC, and MSNBC), so everything gets recorded. Watching the show, we skip over all the schmaltzy crap about how the athlete overcame adversity with the help of a good 12-step program and how they’ve dedicated their performance to their grandmother who was eaten by cannibals in Borneo while doing missionary work, the acid flashbacks of the opening ceremonies, and the performances of the former East German secret police hermaphrodites in the 30,000 mile cross-country ski race. So we’re free to focus on the good stuff like the hockey brawls, the lifts in pairs figure skating, and the girl handing her cell phone to President Bush during the opening ceremonies so he can say hi to her probation officer. When you cut out the crap you can enjoy the highspots in about an hour a day which leaves plenty of time to annoy people who stumble onto your web site looking for curry recipes. Isn’t technology wonderful?

Samizdata David Carr doesn’t approve of the Games, and for some very funny reasons.

Bob Cringely wanted to hook his home to the wireless network Sonic operates in downtown Santa Rosa, but Bennett Mountain stood in the way. Here’s how he did it:

A couple trips to Home Depot and about $100 later, I had in hand a pair of double-headed yagi passive repeating antennas tuned for 2.4 GHz. I built two repeaters thinking that, if I could even find a place to put them on top of Bennett Mountain, two repeaters might be better than one.

Now comes the absolute hardest part of this project, climbing Bennett Mountain with two double yagis, a notebook computer, and various implements for attaching the yagis to a tree and to each other. This is the sort of effort most geeks from the Jolt Cola and Three Musketeers school of computing should probably not try. The top of Bennett Mountain is 1.5 miles away, and 768 feet above my house and there is no way to drive any of it.

Ninety minutes later, I found the bronze marker left by the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey crew in 1956 signifying the top of Bennett Mountain, but from that spot, I couldn’t see my house or downtown. That required climbing a large oak tree. Once up in the tree, a blue oak, the view was amazing! I could see the Pacific Ocean about 30 miles away, and to the south I could even see San Francisco Bay. Downtown and my house were both visible, too, so I mounted the first yagi and pointed each end in the appropriate direction.

That’s what we Bennetts call “intrepid.” If the mountain keeps you from Mohammed, Cringley lays out the details of his gear here. This was all on Slashdot.

TiVo gauges Super Bowl viewing habits of its subscribers

The results are in from the digital video recorder set: Britney Spears beat the men on the field in the Super Bowl instant replay department.

From John Ellis’ blog.

Cisco (CSCO:Nasdaq) lost 1.55 (-8.33%) to 17.06, after it
reported second-quarter earnings that easily beat Wall Street’s
expectations. Its shares jumped in after-hours trading, but fell
again as traders took profits on the good news. For the current
fiscal third quarter, the computer networking gearmaker told
analysts on an earnings conference call that despite the
traditionally week seasonal sales for the first three months of
the year, it expects flat to slightly higher revenue growth, but
declined to provide any longer-term forecast. During the second
quarter ended Jan. 26, Cisco earned 9 cents a share on a pro
forma basis, down from 18 cents a year earlier. Wall Street had
forecast a 5-cent pro forma profit. Cisco’s ability to deliver
strong results in a tech recession pleased a few fans on the
earnings call Wednesday.

Nothing is ever good enough for Wall Street.

80211Planet – Insights: The Magic of CMOS Chip Sets

Marvell Semiconductor, Inc., a subsidiary of Marvell Technology Group, Ltd., recently announced that it had completed development of one of the first all-CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) 802.11b chip set solutions (RF transceiver and baseband processor). The article correctly identified that one of the profound impacts that CMOS technology will have on the 802.11 industry will be substantially lower production costs.

In the San Jose Mercury News (linked at Rough & Tumble we find this:

Venture capital investments rose in the final three months of 2001, the first quarterly increase since the Internet bubble burst nearly two years ago.

The big money can’t side on the sidelines forever, and the low interest rates helped spur it back into the game.