The Blog
18 Dec 2001 The Register axes third of staff : The Register will soon appoint a non-executive chairman and a full-time financial officer. After making four redundant and leaving an editorial team of 7.
Does this sound like sense? "The privately owned service is extremely popular, taking around 30% of traffic in the IT sector according to online measurement company Hitwise, and beating services backed by major publishers such as ZDNet, VNU Net and Silicon.com." If I wasn't broke, I'd give them some money. The reports in this morning papers are beginning to quote the US military as saying things like "The trail has gone cold." "We don't know where Osama is", "We don't know if he's dead or alive". Meanwhile comments are being made about the Elvis Effect. Even if he's really dead, we'll start to hear reports that he's been seen in a supermarket in Boise Idaho. Or Munich. Or Beirut. And we'll never know if they're true or not.
My own feeling is that if /bin/laden ever actually existed, which does seem likely, he just cut his hair, changed his clothes and faded back into the landscape. Even travelling by donkey, he could be in the Steppes or Ulan Bator by now. But then I started thinking about the film The Usual Suspects. Surely Osama bin Laden IS Keyser Soze "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." When the Berlin wall came down, Gorbachev said something like, "I worry about America. Now they have no demon to fight". And what better demon than a man that doesn't exist, but one who "just needed the will to do what the other guy wouldn't. Who would rather see his family dead than live another day after this." [ 18-Dec-01 6:23pm ] "A suspected member of the Al Qaeda terrorist network claimed that Islamic militants infiltrated Microsoft and sabotaged the company's Windows XP operating system, according to a source close to Indian police." Link [thanks, bOing bOing] Did MS actually need any help?
 [ 18-Dec-01 8:56am ] sbp: Q: "Does BrainFuck.Net use the controversial Microsoft Passport system for authentication?"; sbp: A: "No. The Brainfuck language has only 8 commands, and none of them are related to authenticating remote network users."; sbp: I await a Befunge port...; (2001-12-18 00:18) [thanks, Swhack Weblog] This is just SO geeky, I had to post it. For the hard of hearing, here are the 8 commands. And it's Turing Complete!
Can I use BrainFuck.Net to write webservices? No. Well, probably not. [ 18-Dec-01 8:52am ] Getting mildly irritated (nothing like two days ago) with the daVe wINER "Scripting News Awards". The I fell over the Metatalk discussion about same, which led me to last year's "Bloggies" and the "Anti-Bloggies". Last year's Bloggies winner was "#!/usr/bin/girl" which apart from being a perfect Grrrl blog name, led me to "What to do about an Aggressive Moose", at which point I decded I really should stop surfing, get up and go and do something more useful like buy a christmas tree. but instead I posted this and then read more news.
[ 18-Dec-01 8:42am ] 17 Dec 2001 Quite a Sunday. plastic and Kuro5hin both returned after a 3-4 week hiatus. K5 is splitting from OSDN and Plastic lost it's corporate sponsorship in the summer, so they're both going to be strapped for cash. Let's hope they keep going as having just Slashdot was limiting the viewpoints.
[ 17-Dec-01 6:50am ] 16 Dec 2001 [ 16-Dec-01 4:54pm ] [ 16-Dec-01 4:47pm ] The Simulation Argument Are you living in a computer simulation? (a la The Matrix). To which the answer has to be... Yes!
[ 16-Dec-01 4:17pm ] Keep half an eye on this one. SpamSubtract.com
[ 16-Dec-01 9:36am ] 15 Dec 2001 Meanwhile... Tony Blair, speaking to a cheering throng of mindless Euro collectors, openly admits "Yes, my fellow EU-peans... I am the anti-christ!!!" [thanks, blackholebrain] I'm just looking at this and thinking that we should really be called EU-Peons since that's what we are. Menial workers in thrall to the EU.
[ 15-Dec-01 9:19am ] 14 Dec 2001 Just stumbled on Communications From Elsewhere Apart from the blog, there's also the Discordian Tarot reading and the CGI Random PostModernism Essay.
[ 14-Dec-01 8:33pm ] Wow! Voidstar as seen through Blogdex. Check it out! Instant Blogrolling.
[ 14-Dec-01 2:56pm ] What's Wrong With This Picture? Would you pay nearly $1,000 per employee for a knowledge-management portal for your organization? If you did, would you be proud of it? According to a story in InternetWeek, that's what MWH Global did. And since employees "proved reluctant to use it," the company eliminated the existing email system (Notes) and replaced it with web-based email that forces employees to interact with the KM system. Does that sound right to you? [thanks, Blogarithms] Gasp! Can I suggest you hire me to come in and install Drupal? For $1000 per employee, I'll even make my own coffee!
[ 14-Dec-01 2:49pm ] Now that Google has the entire Usenet archives online and searchable, people are starting to ask about other old archives. Like Compuserve, Fidonet old BBS and so on. Interesting. How about the old eGroups archives, pre Yahoogroups taking them over? A quick search failed.
[ 14-Dec-01 2:38pm ] The big auto makers are betting that consumers will pay extra to drive cleaner cars. Honda announces a hybrid Civic, Toyota an electric SUV and DaimlerChrysler tunes up a fuel cell minivan. John Gartner reports from the Electric Transportation Industry Conference in Sacramento. [thanks, Wired News] I had a ride a few weeks ago in a home converted VW Scirocco. It was all electric, had a top speed of 100mph and a range of 100 miles at 30 mph. Extraordinarily effective. The owner commutes 30 miles in it every day. The best thing apart from the silence was that it was really responsive at low speed. Put your foot down and it Goes! I personally think that the near term future is hybrid machines, but this was proof that electric vehicles don't have to behave like milk floats.
[ 14-Dec-01 2:11pm ] Tactical leaks at dawn... [thanks, The Register] The UK Gov is putting pressure on MS by threatening to switch ALL desktops to another platform instead of Win XP Office. Is Star Office or suchlike up to it? Is this the beginning of the XP License backlash?
[ 14-Dec-01 1:55pm ] 13 Dec 2001 [ 13-Dec-01 8:28am ] 12 Dec 2001 You will obey the kitties from the Konstructiv Politburo. You will obey the ...
[ 12-Dec-01 7:39pm ] 
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