originally posted june 20, 2000

toys

Well, it's summer, so kick back, relax, and enjoy a cool glass of updates.

The first thing you've probably noticed is that this domain is now for real, with no more redirects. You actually see the true URL in your browser. I signed up with Dreamhost after hearing many good reviews. I found it to be a pretty good deal myself, at $9.95 per month for 10 MB of space and unlimited e-mail forwarding. I gave five of the remaining seven Weills in my familiy (yes, that's all that's left) e-mail addresses this way. You can get additional space by prepaying for six or twelve months in advance, although this site fits comfortably in 10 MB.

Boys will be boys, and boys love toys. Seeing as though I've already run out of usable words that rhyme with "toys," let's skip the fluff and get down to business. Syosset is a driving town: people drive. Everywhere. Cabs are expensive, buses are nonexistent, and the only train service is designed to get you out of town as quickly as possible. My primary means of transportation used to be the stately 1994 Dodge Intrepid, well-appointed in the cabin but crappily designed most everywhere else. It was struck in the side by a woman who ran a red light last summer, backed into by a still-unknown 4x4 in the Syosset High School parking lot, and awkwardly maneuvered into ever-too-tight parking spaces until landing a place on Consumer Reports' "Used Cars To Avoid" list. The transmission went, it took pricey mid-grade fuel, it got terrible mileage, and it was starting to fall apart. My parents issued an ultimatum: pay the mounting repair bills, or trade it in and get a new car.

Duh.

So I gave in and dumped the Intrepid in favor of the 2000 Volkswagen New Beetle, although it'll hardly be a "new" Beetle when I'm done repaying my father for the difference between its price and the pathetically low trade-in value of the Intrepid. I really like the car, though. It's a small car, but has plenty of room up front and lots of standard features. And hey, who wouldn't like a car with a built-in bud vase?

Expect some pictures of it soon. I don't have a digital camera or a scanner available, so without the aid of CMU's publicly available scanners I'll have to get creative.

My other major toy purchase this summer is effectively a brand new computer, based minimally on parts from my existing system. Going from a Pentium-166 to an Athlon 700 doesn't give much overlap. Most of the parts have to be bought new. The total "upgrade" cost looks to be nearly $1000, including allowances for anything that can go wrong. Of course, I'll probably wind up spending more than that on incidental things that break. Already my trusty Palm III broke, forcing me to wind up buying one at auction for $80.00 (the unit arrived in worn condition with the serial number removed, and the seller has been suspended from eBay for reasons unknown).

Shameless plug alert: I wonder how fast this Athlon 700 can process packets from ProcessTree, a distributed-processing effort similar to distributed.net, but with the added benefit of getting paid for one's CPU cycles. Simply put, distributed processing takes a large computing job and sends small work units across a network (the Internet, for example). The computers on the network process the work units and send them back for the central computer to interpret. Assuming that the results are genuine (which they almost always are) it's a very effective method of processing.

I've scheduled away most of my summer with various pursuits, including the ever-so-low-tech pursuit of reading. I'm currently working my way through Douglas Adams's quintessential works collected in The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide, and I plan on teaching myself Perl and TCP/IP later on if I have time. This isn't a requirement for any of my courses, or even necessarily my job, but it's just satisfying some curiosities of mine.

So it's been a busy month in the technology world, and I follow it by checking breaking-news web sites and discussions like Slashdot. Not like you asked, but here's my opinion on two of the hot topics being debated:

the microsoft breakup

For. Just like Standard Oil and AT&T, Microsoft is an example of a company that braved new ground in an industry but did so in a way that created a monopoly which used illegal and anticompetitive tactics to bolster its position. Consider what would happen if AT&T were to use its monopoly on phone service to "embrace and extend" long distance service with features that would only work between phones with AT&T service. Sure, you could still use other services; nobody's forcing you to use AT&T. However, the typical consumer would simply stay with what he knows, having been persuaded that there's only risks to be had if they switch companies. The consumer has been led to believe that AT&T is the best, for the simple reason that everyone uses it.

Now consider what would happen if Standard Oil made cars that only worked with their fuel. Sure, people could buy other brands of cars, but Standard Oil's would always be the most current and advanced ("innovative" if you will) because their automobile division could just walk down to their fuel division to hear about the latest advances. Third-party products could easily be rendered inoperable by a slight undocumented change in the fuel formula.

Now consider the Microsoft case of separating the operating system and application companies. Microsoft applications, while not necessarily the best in quality, tend to have excellent look and feel when compared to competing products. The learning curve is always reduced because each Office release includes various user interface touches that will be found in the next version of Windows. (Witness the roll-out windows in Office 97, or the unusual file requester in Office 2000.) Additionally, undocumented API's have been used to tie MS Office to the operating system in ways other office suites can't. Furthermore, vendors can be coerced with special "bundling" deals that third parties often just can't compete with. For a good, if anti-Microsoft-biased, read on the subject of MS's business practices, I recommend The Microsoft File by Wendy Goldman Rohm. It's a good, fairly quick read.

the AOL instant messaging fiasco

Against. While I'm for open standards to Help Make the World a Better Place (tm), AOL has built a standard for itself that it is now being forced to open. Open standards for instant messaging do exist, but the fact that AIM is the most popular seems to arouse suspicion of monopolistic practices. The bottom line is that, unlike conventional standards such as the World-Wide Web and e-mail, AOL IM's can only travel across AOL's servers. This means that competitors that implement AIM into their programs must use AOL's servers, while serving their own ad banners instead of AOL's. Ad-free alternatives, like the Java-based Quick Buddy and the TCL/Tk-based TiK are still acceptable, although they use the documented but less-functional TOC protocol. The binary OSCAR protocol supports things like direct connection and voice chat, but is undocumented.

AOL should not be forced to open its standards, although it apparently has if only to quiet its critics. Only when a decentralized network is created, and the load is not placed squarely on AOL's servers, will truly free communication be possible. I hate AOL as much as the next guy, but they're providing a useful service for free and people have the nerve to complain that it's not "free as in speech" just yet. BFD.

About me updated, for the first time in quite some time.

Back to June 2000, or to the year 2000.