Caught In |
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by Al Massey |
"The fantastic advances in the field of
communication constitute a grave danger to the privacy of the individual."
Earl Warren
As I write this (Aug 16, 1996) the browser wars are at their peak. In the dim hours of the morning, August 13, the servers at Microsoft imploded under the demand for Internet Explorer 3.0. It appears that over 32,000 users downloaded the eight meg file in the first six hours. Eight T3 lines connected to Windows NT Server and Microsoft Internet Information Server, capable of supporting 20,000 concurrent users, were brought to their "virtual" knees. Ahh, such is life on the Internet.
Not to be outdone in the PR department, the Netscrapers from Mountain Home fired up the bit-bucket and clogged the backbone with the news that they would release NEW and IMPROVED Netscape Navigator 3.0 the following Monday, August 19, and reveal why IE 3.0 still has a "long way to go."
According to Netscape, Navigator is faster, smaller, provides better security, is more than just a browser, is available for sixteen platforms (yeah right, what about Amiga or CoCo or CP/M?), and Netscape promises even greater things soon, when they introduce Collaborative Networking with "Galileo."
Netscape is betting the future on their installed base of some 40 million users and studies that show 87.7% of the surfing sufferers use Navigator. The next few months are sure going to be interesting as this Silicon Valley bunch continues its assault on the Duke of Redmond. One word to the wise: the trail to Redmond is littered with the bleached bones of those that have gone before them.
"That which does not kill me, makes me stronger." Nietzsche
Massey's corollary : "That which does not kill me better run damn fast."
It sure is a great time to be alive. Right after I got through reviewing the antics of Netscape and Microsoft along comes Big Blue to liven up my dull existence.
From deep in the heart of Zaire, where IBM is busily shooting yet another of its commercials having nothing to do with modern computing, comes the news that one M'wana Ndeti, a member of Zaire's Bantu tribe, used an IBM global uplink network modem yesterday to crush a nut.
Ndeti, who spent 20 minutes trying to open the nut by hand, easily cracked it open by smashing it repeatedly with the powerful modem. "I could not crush the nut by myself," said the 47-year-old Ndeti, who added the savory nut to a thick, peanut-based soup minutes later. "With IBM's help, I was able to break it." Ndeti discovered the nut-breaking, 28.8 V.34 modem yesterday, when IBM was shooting a commercial in his southwestern Zaire village. During a break in shooting, which shows African villagers eagerly teleconferencing via computer with Japanese schoolchildren, Ndeti snuck onto the set and took the modem, which he believed would serve well as a "smashing" utensil.
IBM officials were not surprised the longtime computer giant was able to provide Ndeti with practical solutions to his everyday problems. "Our telecommunications systems offer people all over the world global networking solutions that fit their specific needs," said Herbert Ross, IBM's director of marketing. "Whether you're a nun cloistered in an Italian abbey or an Aborigine in Australia's Great Sandy Desert, IBM has the ideas to get you where you want to go today."
"The Consultants Creed: It is immoral to allow a naive end user to keep his money."
If you have been using the 'net standard newsreader FreeAgent and would like to add features such as Kill/Watch Lists, Multiple languages, Single-key navigation and Demon support to your Usenet enjoyment look no further, FreeAgent's big brother Agent .99e is out and available for download.
Although Agent has been available for some time, I have waited to extol its virtues until it contained a feature set worthy of the price tag and was hearty (I did not say robust) enough to distinguish it from the "Free" version. If you are a news junkie and spend a great deal of time plugged into the news server, downloading say three thousand message headers only to find that twenty-five hundred of them amounted to a flame war you weren't particularly interested in the Kill List filter alone is worth forking over a few bucks for. Conversely, if there is a subject that is near and dear to your heart and you don't want to risk losing even one message, you can enact the Watch List and forget about it. You can create both filters based on the author, subject or message length.
Agent allows you to define multiple languages and specify what fonts to use for the message list and body as well as the spell-checker to use when composing messages. You can assign a particular language to each group, so that when you select it the message list and body panes use the fonts for that group's language.
A new option I found particularly useful was the Navigate option that uses the SPACE key as its accelerator allowing you to page down through the current message. When you reach the end of the message it jumps to the next unread message. Agent also added a new option that allows you to keep track of gaps in the range of retrieved messages. This seems to fix the problem where Agent was not retrieving all messages due to non-sequential article numbers on the news server.
Agent .99e is available in both 16 bit and 32bit versions with free upgrades to version 1.0 when it is available.
If you already have Agent you can get a free patch for this upgrade. Go to: http://www/forteinc.com.
When choosing between two evils, I always like to pick the one I've never tried before.
Boss Hog (my main 'puter) and I am always trying out nifty little programs designed to make life on the 'net a little easier, and one we would like to share with you is Sextant Pro, a small program that works with Netscape Navigator. Sextant Pro differs from its competition by assigning HotKeys to allow a user to call up Web pages with a keystroke.
Available for Windows 95 and Windows 3.1, Sextant is easy to install and includes help files which get users started quickly. Sextant starts up with the bookmark file in view. The first time it starts, the program asks users if they wish to copy the Netscape bookmark file. If the answer is yes, Sextant copies the files into a separate file and maintains them there. At first I thought that maintaining two bookmark files would prove cumbersome, and, in some ways it is, Sextant proved to be worth the added trouble. Sextant provides keyboard shortcuts allowing users to add bookmarks to their file without leaving Netscape, and similarly, assign HotKey features to call up frequently accessed URL's.
Overall I found Sextant Pro to be a time saving and useful utility but, sadly, at press time it only supports Netscape Navigator and Windows 3.1/Windows 95. For information go to: http://wsdesigns.com/sextant and available for about $24.95.
I am a computer, dumber than any human and smarter than an administrator.
The National Science Foundation recently announced that two projects important in the transition to the commercial Internet have completed their basic missions ahead of schedule.
In April 1995 the NSF designated Network Access Points, or NAPs, (to pass messages from one network to another) and the Routing Arbiter (to find a path to each destination) to support the transition from the government-supported NSFNET to the commercial Internet. A review of these projects has proved that multiple network providers can work together in a competitive marketplace, and now may be scheduled for transition to commercial operations themselves.
"This program has been very successful in helping private industry to build the modern Internet," said George Strawn, networking division director at the NSF. "It is now time for us to focus on a next generation that goes beyond simple connections." "In a way, this is like having your kid grow up and leave home _ this part of the project is now strong enough to make it in the real world."
In the mid 1980's the NSF created the NSFNET backbone to serve as the infrastructure for the research and education community and as its success spread to the commercial world, thousands of new internet service providers connected millions of new customers by exchanging traffic at network access points according to directions governed by routing arbiters. NSF decommissioned the NSFNET in April, 1995.
As part of the new architecture, NSF had partially funded four network access point projects: New York NAP to Sprint, San Francisco NAP to Bellcore with Pacific Bell as the operator, Chicago NAP to Bellcore with Ameritech as the operator, and Washington DC NAP to Metropolitan Fiber Systems, Inc. The NSF also had two cooperative agreements for the routing arbiter. Merit Network, Inc. and the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute were funded for activities to include: promoting Internet routing and stability; establishing the network framework and policy databases; developing procedures to resolve problems between network entities; developing advanced routing technologies; providing simplified routing strategies; and promoting distributed operation and management of the Internet.
The basic operational functions of the RA can now be shifted to the commercial marketplace as well, allowing investigators on the projects to focus on the next generation. The NSF-funded operations of these NAPs and RAs can now shift to the commercial marketplace as their researchers focus on connections and routing for advanced networking. Both actions help NSF to move to the next stage, a stronger focus on the high-performance Internet of the future needed to support today’s advanced research. NSF is an independent federal agency responsible for non-medical research in all fields of science and engineering, with an annual budget of about $3 billion. NSF receives more than 50,000 requests for funding annually, including at least 30,000 new proposals.
Al Massey is a HAL-PC member.
E-mail me at webmaster@hal-pc.org with any comments you have and tell me what you want to see here.
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