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Low End PC Archive. June 2002

Links Low End PC

• A simple low-end PC project, Roger M, Thinking From the Box, 06.26. How to turn an ancient PC into the heart of a home monitoring and security system.
• Off the Net and back on again, Dirk Pilat, Low End BSD, 06.14. Stinker loses his connection to the Internet - and gets it back again.
• Why domain owners deserve a grace period, Dan Knight, Mac Musings, Low End Mac, 06.10. The MacSlash fiasco illustrates why domain owners deserve a grace period and registrars need to be more proactive.
• On the Net with OpenBSD, Dirk Pilat, Low End BSD, 06.06. Stinker is finally connected to the Internet and able to browse.
• Little computers, big possibilities, Michelle Klein-Häss (a.k.a. Ms. Geek), Geek Speak, 06.03. The once disparaged "bitty box" has a new lease on life.
• more in the May 2002 archive

Around the Web

• News: PCs: More than 1 billion served, Michael Kanellos, c|net, 06.30. "Approximately 1 billion PCs have been shipped worldwide since the mid-'70s...."
• Analysis: Getting to know you, J. D. Lasica, Online Journalism Review, 06.27. "Registration required" may lose some visitors, but most appear to come back eventually.
• Dark Side: MS security patch EULA gives admin privileges on your box, Thomas C. Greene, The Register, 06.30. Microsoft reserves right to automatically download to your computer, restrict access to digital content.
• Dark Side: Broken trust, D. F. Tweney, The Tweney Report, 06.28. "Microsoft wants you to entrust it with the safekeeping of your computer's processor, memory, and hard drive."
• Web: Reasons to think before you link, Richard Poynder, FT.com, 06.24. "Recent cases in Europe and the US, however, have led some to conclude that the law has begun to look more favourably on those wishing to bar unwelcome links."
• Dark Side: Beware Palladium!, John H. Farr, Applelinks, 06.27. "Palladium is really a scheme to replace TCP/IP with something that Microsoft will own and license...."
• Opinion: Baltimore Sun spots MHz myth, brings P4 slowness to light, Vern Seward, Mac Observer, 06.27. "The problem is that different processors do different amounts of work in each clock cycle."
• News: Kiss your MP3s at work goodbye, Lisa M. Bowman, c|net, 06.27. Copyright, the RIAA, liability, company equipment, getting fired - good reasons to buy an iPod.
• Dark Side: Software subscriptions: A bad idea whose time has come, David Pogue, New York Times, 06.27 (free registration required). "...the beneficiary of the new program is Microsoft, not the customer."
• Opinion: One nation under God?, Dan Knight's Soapbox, Cobweb Publishing, 06.28. Can prohibiting schoolchildren from freely reciting the Pledge of Allegiance solve anything?
• Advice: Website Automation with PHP and MySQL, Part 11, Dan Knight, Online Tech Journal, Low End Mac, 06.28. Using PHP and MySQL to track how often a link is clicked.
• Web: Publishers sue Gator over Web ad tactics, Leslie Walker, Washington Post, 06.27. Gator uses spyware to display online ads linked to sites with which they have no ad contracts.
• Opinion: Huh? U.S. court rules pledge of allegiance "unconstitutional", Charles W. Moore, Miscellaneous Ramblings, Low End Mac, 06.27. "...the First Amendment makes no reference, explicit or implicit, to 'separation of church and state....'"
• Web: Way beyond the banner, Owen Thomas, Business 2.0, 06.27. What works in online advertising - and what just annoys people.
• Web: Puncturing Web ads before they pop up, David Pogue, New York Times (free registration required), 06.27. No ad blocker is perfect, but they can make surfing more pleasant.
• Web: Salon in dire straits, Slashdot, 06.26. Even with 40,000 subscribers, dropping ad income creates a growing deficit of $75 million.
• Huh? Pledge of allegiance ruled unconstitutional, Fox News, 06.26. "The Pledge of Allegiance is an unconstitutional endorsement of religion and cannot be recited in public schools, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday."
• Opinion: Is Microsoft really to blame for the sad state of security on the Internet?, Vern Seward, Just a Thought, Mac Opinion, 06.26. "...we continued to buy their stuff even though they have demonstrated that they either cannot or will not make a secure product."
• Advice: Declare email independence, Simson Garfinkel, The Net Effect, Technology Review. "In the 21st century, having your own domain name is simple electronic self-defense."
• Web: Verisign Off, VerisignOff.org, 06.25. Why you might want to sign off of Network Solutions (NSI) and Verisign.
• Opinion: Falling prey to the Verisign beast, Kirk L. Kroeker, osOpinion, 06.25. "Most people who love the Internet hate VeriSign more than open source advocates hate Microsoft."
• Education: State schools may test idea of laptops for kids, Mike Wendland, Detroit Free Press, 06.24. State now provides a compute to each teacher. Proposal seeks one per K-12 student in 2004.
• Web: Teoma vs. Google, round two, Search Engine Watch, 04.02. "...Teoma is not a wholesale replacement for Google, nor is it an engine you'll want to use exclusively."
• Advice: Website Automation with PHP and MySQL, part 10, Dan Knight, Online Tech Journal, Low End Mac, 06.26. Using the if command to make sure records with empty fields are displayed properly.
• Education: Open-and-shut case for laptops?, Sherry Jones, Wilmington Star, 06.24. New Hanover educators say all students need laptops, hope to deploy to all within 5 years.
• Opinion: Spam vs. spam, Andrew Leonard, Salon, 06.24. SpamAssassin, an effective, open source filtering engine seeks out and flags spam on the server. (And the biggest, slowest, most annoying online ad we've ever seen between pages 1 and 2.)
• Advice: Website automation with PHP and MySQL, part 9, Dan Knight, Online Tech Journal, Low End Mac, 06.24. Using a database to handle external links - and then going a step beyond.
• Web: Free Web-mail waning?, Mike Musgrove, A Closer Look, Washington Post, 06.23. Lots of sites, but several vanish each month.
• Opinion: Unicode: Sick of this push and pull, Piere Igot, Apple Peel, Applelust, 06.21. The mess caused by different character sets, and how Unicode will eventually make everything better.
• Opinion: A battle PC giants should lose, Jill Ericksson, osOpinion, 06.21. Dell, H-P, IBM, Gateway, and others hurting because "unbranded" PCs account for over half of unit sales.
• Web: NPR Online reconsiders link policy, NPR, 06.21. NPR recognizes that "the majority of the linking on the Web is not infringement," reevaluating existing policy on links.
• Web: It takes a village to save a site, Paul Boutin, Wired, 06.21. Kuro5hin site raises $35,000 (half its annual budget) from readers in less than a week.
• Web: We're broke: The economics of a Web community, Rusty Foster, Kuro5hin, 06.17. Serious thoughs on funding a website.
• Rights: Copyright office halves Web royalty rate, Yahoo/Reuters, 06.20. Unlike radio stations, Webcasters have to pay royalties. That rate has been cut in half.
• Rights: Paul Trummel pulls site, goes free for now, John H. Farr, Applelinks, 06.20. Paul Trummel, a 70-year-old man, has been imprisoned for 111 days because of his Web site satirizing officials of a retirement home. Free speech?
• Tech: USB, FireWire head to battle, John G. Spooner, ZDNet, 06.20. FireWire established, but USB 2.0 more cost effective.
• Humor: If computers were like home appliances, Jeff Adkins, The Lite Side, Low End Mac, 06.18. Just be glad your PC is nothing like so many of your appliances.
• Analysis: Readers Weigh in on Mac Challenge, Steve Watkins, The Practical Mac, Low End Mac, 06.18. Lots of comments on Unix-based Mac OS X vs. Windows XP - but no question that Win XP is inferior.
• Dark Side: My name's too rude for MS Passport, Andrew Orlowski, The Register, 06.17. Sorry, Mr. Woodcock, you'll have to change your name before you can use .NET.
• Web: A patent on pop under ads?, eContentMac.com, 06.13. If this is a defensible patent, it could mean the end of one major Web annoyance.
• Opinion: McAfee manufactures virus threat, michael, Slashdot, 06.14. Enough of the anti-virus hype about viruses that don't even exist on the Internet.
• Software: Mozilla 1.1a available, Mozilla.org, 06.11. Available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS, and lots more.
• Opinion: Windows frustrations, Damien Barrett, mrbarrett.com, 06.13. Windows viruses and brain dead installers.
• Opinion: Darwin meets the digital camera, David Pogue, New York Times, 06.13 (free registration required). Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Minolta, Kodak . . . which is the best 4 MP digicam?
• Advice: Buying the right digicam, David Pogue, New York Times, 06.13 (free registration required).
• Tech: 10-gigabit ethernet standard approved, Slashdot, 06.13. New standard is fiber only, faster than almost all of today's hard drives.
• Web: Credit-card hackers stung with bogus IIS 'sploit, Thomas C. Greene, The Register, 06.12 [MsGeek.org]. Security experts from CardCops.com and PenetrationTest.com create honeypot server, catch 200+ hackers.
• Opinion: OS X from a Linux perspective, Jason Walsh, PPC Linux, Low End Mac, 06.13. "OS X is great. OS X is beautiful. In fact, sad to say it, but OS X knocks Linux into a cocked hat."
• Web: Open Link Policy. A small step in protecting your right to link.
• Humor: If Windows had windowshades, Jeff Adkins, The Lite Side, Low End Mac, 06.11. Isn't it about time Microsoft "borrowed" windowshades from the Mac? Here's what would happen.
• OS: Digital Research and the GEM OS, Roger M., OS News, 06.09. A history of GEM, the "other Windows" was recently featured on Low End PC as well.
• Digicams: Pentax Digibino DB100, Digigraphica, 06.10. Unique digicam built into 7x binoculars produced 1024x768 images.
• Digicams: Pentax Optio 330 RS, 430 RS, Digigraphics, 06.10. New 3, 4 megapixel models include 11 MB built in memory - shoot even when your memory card is full.
• Tech: Digital film comparison, Digital Photography Review. A look at the speed of Compact Flash memory cards, including real world read and write performance. IBM Microdrive 1 GB still the write speed champion.
• Advice: Picking the right 35mm SLR, Dan Knight, Digigraphica, 06.07. Understanding the basics of reflex cameras so you can pick the one that best suits your needs.
• Analysis: Could broadband become the law?, Anne Jue, MacCentral, 06.07. Should the government push for universal broadband access? Does the market want it?
• Opinion: Open source reality check, Jason Walsh, PPC Linux, Low End Mac, 06.06. Open source idealism, business pragmatism, and the real reason programers write software.
• Advice: Five free online tools, Jeff Adkins, View From the Classroom, Low End Mac, 06.06. Five free online services useful to teachers, webmasters, and others.
• Software: Mozilla 1.0 released. Finally out of beta, Mozilla hopes to become a serious alterntive to Internet Explorer.
• Opinion: Why does anybody need to be in charge of online speech?, Raena Armitage, Mac Observer, 06.04. Thoughts on free speech and national laws on the Internet.
• Analysis: Mac Challenge Results, Steve Watkins, The Practical Mac, Low End Mac, 06.04. One month with an iMac and OS X, another with a Dell and Windows XP. Which is the more practical platform?
• News: Now you pay for drivers - Umax pioneers new price gouge, Andrew Orlowski, The Register, 06.03. Device drivers no longer available as free downloads. LEPC's advice: Look at other brands of scanners.
• Ezine: Web Page Design for Designers, June issue available.
• Opinion: Learning from the MacSlash fiasco, Dan Knight, Mac Musings, Low End Mac, 06.03. How one problem after another took MacSlash off the Web last week, and what we can learn from it.
• Opinion: Plagiarism vs. research, Jeff Adkins, Mac Lab Report, Low End Mac, 06.03. A teacher's thoughts on detecting plagiarism and promoting real research.
• more in the May 2002 archive

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