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| Woz Comments on "Pirates of Silicon Valley" |
| David Brin Comments on Star Wars |
| The Jar-Jargonizer |
| 3-D Geometry Art |
| High-End Graphic Design |
| Art as Therapy |
| Serious Online Help for Artists |
| Netsurfer Recommendations |
| For Online Librarians |
| A Monthly E-Zine of Interesting Facts |
| I'd Rather Have a Bottle in Front of Me... |
| The Tape Wagging the Duct |
| Eating Crow, and Other Ornithological Tidbits |
| New Zealand Science |
| Healthy Kids |
| Image Search Engine Moves |
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BREAKING SURF
GeoCities Homesteaders Protest Yahoo Terms of Service
Events like this make us realize there's a lack of good spin doctors in cyberspace. Yahoo merges with GeoCities and imposes new terms of service on GeoCities homesteaders which state that anyone who submits content automatically grants Yahoo "the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive... right and license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish... such Content." In return, a protest site urges all GeoCities users who wish to retain ownership of their content to flee to other providers and calls for a boycott of all Yahoo services. Some homesteaders gray out their pages in protest while others have trouble getting GeoCities to remove their content. Yahoo, in a public relations nightmare, explains its rationale and adds this passage to Section 8: "Yahoo does not own Content you submit, unless we specifically tell you otherwise before you submit it." Some protesters don't feel this is enough and the boycott continues.Terms: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
Protest: http://www.sitepowerup.com/boycottyahoo/boycottyahoo.htm
Gray out: http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Lofts/9264/
Rationale: http://docs.yahoo.com/docs/info/toshelp.html
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/20472.html
CNet: http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,38643,00.html
Australian legislators have approved a sweeping bill which rates online content and restricts access to certain types of materials. The rating system resembles the system that rates books and movies. Minors may not access any materials rated R, and sites with material rated X or CR (Category Refused, a catch-all term for violent material or materials which "offend against the standards of morality, decency, and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults") may not be viewed by anyone unless the Australian Broadcasting Authority specifically judges that the site is "protecting children from exposure". Whatever the intent, the law was clearly conceived by people who have no clue about the nature of the Net and who don't know that the legislation will not diminish the availability of this type of material. If anything, the law just might foment a lucrative underground industry in illicit Net access. Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) has turned its page black in protest and offers more detail.
Law: http://www.ozemail.com/~mbaker/9907720.html
EFA: http://www.efa.org.au/
Linux vs. NT Round II: NT Still Performs Better, Mindcraft Vindicated
Linux fans heaped abuse on Mindcraft when it published a Microsoft-sponsored performance study of Linux and Windows NT servers. A lot of it was knee-jerk reaction against the Evil Empire, but amidst the dross there were some legitimate complaints about how the study was conducted. Mindcraft, to its credit, offered to repeat the tests under the keen eye of a neutral third party. PC Week magazine oversaw this second round and Linux supporter Red Hat Software helped out with configuration. The result? Windows NT is significantly faster than the latest implementation of Linux as file server and Web server. Linux programmers pretty much know where the problems lie - with the single-threaded TCP stack and large-grained kernel locks - and are already working on changes in the 2.3.x series of Linux kernels. Developer.com has the story for the non-technically inclined.Mindcraft: http://www.mindcraft.com/whitepapers/openbench1.html
Developer: http://www.developer.com/news/news2.html
AAAS Releases Online Anonymity Study
The prestigious American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) - it publishes Science, one of the top scientific journals in the world - has released a study on online anonymity. The study, "Anonymous Communication Policies for the Internet", concludes that the benefits of online anonymity outweigh the disadvantages, and that regulating anonymity will limit the free exchange of information, the lifeblood of scientific and technological advancement. This heavyweight policy document is sure to be used and abused in the upcoming legislative battles over the issue of anonymity. Worth reading.http://www.aaas.org/spp/anon/
Bugtraq Discussion List Has New Home
Over the years, Bugtraq has grown into one of the best security resources around. This mailing list is the preferred source for noise-free discussion of security issues in a wide variety of software and operating systems. The list has moved to a new location, and shares space with a variety of other related resources. You can find Bugtraq under the "forums" menu. The site brims with security resources, such as security news, links, vendor information, a library, and numerous free tools. An essential bookmark for sysadmin professionals.http://www.securityfocus.com/
SETI@Home - Improved, but Web Page Hacked
A number of Slashdot devotees report that the home page of SETI@Home was hacked. The usual page had been replaced with a picture of Alf (it's fixed now). Slashdot notes that "the perpetrators have been somewhat polite about it" and embedded a comment in the new HTML telling everyone where the original page was stashed. It strikes us as rather ideologically pointless to hack the alien hunters, but it does give us an excuse to provide you with more then you ever wanted to know about Alf. On a more serious note, SETI@Home seems to have eased its growing pains with new servers online and an updated version of its data-grinding software (the buggy Mac update will be re-released soon). Read the Technical News Reports rather than the News Summary. Also, every time we try to embarrass you for not yet joining NSD's SETI@Home team, we get another 30 people signed up, so... shame on you!Slashdot: http://slashdot.org/articles/99/07/04/1640238.shtml
Alf: http://www.tvshows.de/alf/e-main.htm
SETI: http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/
Join: http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/cgi?cmd=team_lookup&name=Netsurfer+Digest
National Gambling Impact Study
It's a safe bet that a comprehensive and detailed report on gambling in the USA would call for domestic and foreign governments to place severe restrictions on gambling over the Internet. But the possibility of imposing such restrictions on an industry that by some estimates 14 million people patronized last year and which uses sophisticated technology and offshore server locations to avoid legal restrictions is a crap shoot. The National Gambling Impact Study devoted only one chapter of eight to online gambling concerns. The rest of the report covers almost all forms of gambling (except day trading) and their social consequences. Particularly sobering is the chapter devoted to the impact of gambling on people and places; the report carefully outlines the economic benefits of gambling on a locality, which begs the question of the states' complicity.http://www.ngisc.gov/
ONLINE CULTURE
Woz Comments on "Pirates of Silicon Valley"
"Pirates of Silicon Valley", a recent cable TV film here in the US, told the story of the early days of Apple and Microsoft and naturally took some liberties with the truth. In response, Steve Wozniak, of Apple fame, posted his comments on the movie and about his days at Apple. Steve has an e-mail address to which you can send questions, but be nice and read the ones he has already answered to avoid duplicates. Good stuff from a guy who helped start the personal computer revolution.http://www.woz.org/woz/presponses/commets.html
David Brin Comments on Star Wars
SF author David Brin had a few things to say about the latest Star Wars installment and the allegedly appalling storytelling ineptitude of George Lucas. As a result he got about thousands of e-mail messages alternately praising and castigating him for his opinions. That prompted a rebuttal which widened the dialogue to the other Star Wars films. The whole thing is kind of like arguing about who'd win a cage match between the Fantastic Four and the X-Men, best enjoyed over a keg of beer with no sharp objects within reach. Read and enjoy. Oh, the Four would wipe the floor with the X-Men physically but would be soundly trounced in the fashion competition.Original Article: http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/feature/1999/06/15/brin_side/
Rebuttal: http://www.kithrup.com/brin/starwars.html
Fantastic Four: http://expert.cc.purdue.edu/~shorton/ffmain.html
X-Men: http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Rampart/4510/xmen.htm
Okiday, so this no really Online Culture, but "The Phantom Menace" about to fade off our cultural radar screen an' wee-sa need to get this in before it does. Type any message or put any URL into this page an' the mysterious Net elves translate the text into Gunganese - more specifically, as if it came from the dexterous tongue (the long black tangible one, not the speakalike, but that too, wee-sa guess) of Jar Jar Binks himself. Wheee!
http://www.hit-n-run.com/jarjar.html
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
We think this is quite possibly the coolest online site for 3-D geometrical art and it comes with, as a bonus, over 1,000 virtual reality polyhedra that you can interact with in a variety of ways. George W. Hart, the man behind the site, knows his math. When you get tired of playing with the interactive pyramids, dipyramids, and trapezohedra - and, we must confess, it took us a long time to tire of it - you can always check out the pavilion of polyhedreality or peruse his online book of linear algebra and dimensional analysis. Still, you certainly don't have to be a complete number cruncher to enjoy yourself amid the stacks o' fun. And if the stuff inspires you, you can even find projects to try, but heed George's warning: "If you are like me, you like to make things out of paper clips. But the snub dodecahedron is a relatively tough one, though not impossible...."http://www.li.net/~george/
KALIBER10000 uses the work of graphic artists and designers as it generates its slick look and feel. The e-zine really reads more like a glossy arts mag - lots of sharp images, clever touches, and some very gallery-installation-like work. Sometimes you feel like the halogen lights burn a little too bright but anyone interested in look and image online would do well to drop by. You'll notice some serious names on this site and much exceptional work. Keeping things dynamic, the site maintainers intend to refresh the site on a weekly basis, every Monday. In turns sexy, dark, and comic, and perhaps best enjoyed with a handy glass of wine. We especially liked the collection of desktops from graphic designers - we'll never get tired of looking at other people's desktops again.
http://www.k10k.net/
We'll let the mission statement of the Survivors Art Foundation speak for it: "Dedicated to encourage healing through the arts, Survivors Art Foundation is a non-profit organization committed to empowering Visual, Literary and Performing Artists with effective expressive outlets, via Web Gallery, National Exhibitions, Outreach Programs and Publications." This gallery is for adults; many exhibits contain graphic material. It might not be easy for you to look at these works and read the backgrounds of the artists, but that's the idea. Some of the displays will be particularly difficult to handle for people who are still working through their own traumas, so if you fall into that category, visit at your own risk.
http://www.survivorsartfoundation.org/
Serious Online Help for Artists
The Open Studio Web site should help non-profit arts organizations, artists, and technology trainers who wish to effectively use the WWW. The site contains a lot of tips for the artist just coming online and pointers to more help. Topics cover computer basics to Web site design, publication, and - what every artist needs to know - how to secure funding and grants. The National Endowment for the Arts and the Benton Foundation have joined efforts to build the site, which includes Digital Canvas, an e-zine that covers such diverse topics as accessibility issues and profiles of artists and individuals who use the Web for their work.http://www.openstudio.org/
BOOKS & E-ZINES
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Items our staff likes and you might too. Click on the image or title to order at a hefty discount from our affiliates Amazon.com and Beyond.com, and send a few pennies our way as well.
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MP3 Power! with Winamp
Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil, and Ruin
You Don't Know Jack Movieshttp://marylaine.com/exlibris/index.html
A Monthly E-Zine of Interesting Facts
Under section headings of kitchen, office, garden, attic, workshop and guestroom, we can learn pretty much anything at this trivia-based e-zine. Have you ever wanted to know the history of shoes, from mythology (Mercury) to fairytales (Cinderella)? Did you know that until the 1800s, shoes were not made specifically for left and right feet? The workshop archive listed items such as concrete and measurement principles, the office looked at everything from cookies to viruses, and the kitchen provided recipes like Beef Wellington and Caesar Salad. Diverse and strangely entertaining.http://pages.hotbot.com/arts/lynne/index.html
SURFING SCIENCE
I'd Rather Have a Bottle in Front of Me...
History of the Lobotomy is full of terrors. In the mid 1930s, pioneer invasive neurologist Dr. Walter Freeman - in the words of authors Robert Youngson and Ian Schott, the "greatest advocate of psychosurgery" - thrilled by the promise of surgical rectification of behavior, perfected transorbital attacks with local anesthetic and ice picks in "deteriorated patients". Next came patients in better condition. Freeman, elected president of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology, reveled in the lobotomy procedure before his peers. Even a clinical professor of neurology, a veteran of World War I, collapsed at the sight of Freeman in action. Freeman's revelries greatly influenced the work of Egas Moniz, whose Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1949 "sealed the future for tens of thousands of psychiatric patients." We half expect Hollywood to recreate Freeman's specially equipped camper van from the 1960s, which he called a lobotomobile. Ick!http://public.carleton.edu/~vestc/lobotomy.html
What is it about a simple adhesive tape that can stir such passions in the human breast? It's begun to seem that ducts exist merely to provide a perching place for duct tape. And in that lies the irony. If you haven't gotten the news yet, the Residential Thermal Distribution Systems (RTDS) site will break it to you: duct tape is terrible at holding ventilation ducts together. It falls off and leaves a sticky residue. Almost anything else works better. The site does its best to get away from the strange attractor of the tape and roam in the wider world of ventilation and heating, but keeps coming back to it obsessively, with many pictures of duct tape that has failed to do its job, old friend Max Sherman's Ig Nobel account, and duct tape humor.
RTDS: http://ducts.lbl.gov/
Ig Nobels: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/misc/ignobel.html
Eating Crow, and Other Ornithological Tidbits
While Kevin J. McGowan has done a lot of straight-ahead research on crow social life, revealing, for example, that they are cooperative breeders, with several adults sharing child-rearing responsibilities, he has also probed more deeply into the sorts of things more shallow people are interested in, like "are there white crows?" He has pictures of several (almost) white crows. Kevin doesn't think the expression "eating crow" came about because crows taste really bad, but he does have some interesting observations on the common comparison "tastes like chicken". McGowan also says that crows can know you personally, and pick you out in a crowd - either for good or for ill. And crows only moved into urban areas worldwide in the 1950s, though no one knows why. Have fun with this smart bird.http://cuvc.bio.cornell.edu/mcgowan/index.html
New Zealand is blossoming into a science and technology presence, and this site documents its many recent innovations and discoveries. Wow! It's Science offers sections like The Brain (interviews with relevent scientists), The Vault (essential resources for research and development), and Quantum Leap (getting a career in a related field), but the most exciting was the Synaptic Reactor, which provides lots of experiments to do at home such as making snow and crumpling a can with atmospheric pressure.
http://www.science.net.nz/
As you may remember, there are a lot of scary things in childhood: allergies, bedwetting, asthma, violence, infections, etc. To our online rescue comes Dr. Greene's HouseCalls, a low-bandwidth, highly practical compendium of answers and advice from Alan Greene, MD, who fields loads of pediatric questions about common and rare disorders, behaviors, and situations with matter-of-fact authority. Discussion boards, linked offsite, are fairly active. Dr. Greene hosts live chat often. Yahoo Internet Life calls this site "The Best Resource for New Parents on the Internet." We agree.
http://www.drgreene.com/
COMMUNITY SUPPORT
The Arthur Image Search System, which as we reported in NSD 4.31 ("Image Search Engine") allows you to search for images based on visual criteria, has moved to a new URL.http://www.isi.edu/cct/arthur/