Currently, I am helping my sister-in-law with her Mac. I am downloading IE5. It's a 6.8 MB d/l. I'm used to a nice DSL connection where a 6.8 MB d/l takes a few minutes. Her computer has a 28.8 modem. It is taking 30+ minutes to get this file.

How does the world handle this? Why haven't the masses risen up and demanded broadband? I can't imagine how painful the net is when your connection is at 28.8.

I have nothing against AOL. It works great for many people and that's good. I don't use it but many people do happily.

What I do have a problem with is people using an AOL email address for business. I mean come on, how unprofessional can you get? Would you have all your business calls on your home phone?

It costs less than $20 a month to have a company email address. If any business can't afford $20 a month they won't be in business long.

Why am I so pissed? Well, I'm dealing with the producer of a new TV show and he has an AOL email address and uses the cutsy HTML stuff in his emails. This guy makes MILLIONS and he's still using AOL for his business. Perhaps I'm an elitist from the early days of the net, but why would any company want to advertise their ISP instead of their company?

This is perhaps the greatest piece of media you will ever find on the internet.

You must download it now.

It's like 6.5 MB, so you modem users are hating it.

Today I actually waited outside in a line to buy tickets to a concert.



Yes, I got lucky and had the bracelet that put me third in line to get tickets. Yes, Michele and I will be seeing the following bands: Deftones, Incubus, Moby, No Doubt, Papa Roach, Weezer, Disturbed, Linkin Park, Green Day, and Everclear.

Everclear is Michele's favorite band, and Green day is mine. Good karma I guess.

Calm down. I'm not that insane. I was asked to get a PSX2 for the office. The only reasonable way to buy one is to get it off an auction. Furthermore, I needed to find an seller that accepts the corporate American Express card. Therefore, the high cost.

I will have to test out this system. Oh yes, test it I will. :)Where's my copy of Kessen?

Netscape 4.7x is sucking so bad,I'm trying Internet Explorer. It's OK, except on HUGE flaw. In Netscape, I can right click on an image and one option is "Copy Image Location". I use this all the time.

The problem is that IE doesn't have this right click option. The closest I can do is to right clcik on the image, choose properties, and then copy the URl from the properties gump. That is WAY too much work.

Someone wake up Steve Ballmer and make him fix this.

Yah, yah, I know about Netscape 6, but I'll rant about that later.

RP on the ‘hard shard’?

When Siege Perilous was started, many players stayed away. “It will all be PKs” is what people said. The shard began and yes, the PKs showed up in full force. Anti-PK teams were formed to combat them. Eventually the line between anti and PK became blurred as former PKs joined the anti cause to fight blue members of PK guilds. All the while, RP flourished with guilds of orcs, dwarves, undead of several sorts, assorted empires, various religious orders, noble houses, and assassin guilds. All of these guilds participated in the fighting. Alliances not based on anti or PK were formed.

As time passed, the Renaissance changes occurred on the regular shards and the Felucca facets seemed rather empty as PKs were confined and safety was guaranteed in Trammel. On Siege, alliances rose and fell, guilds disappeared, red or blue color no longer determined what kind of person a character was. Large scale guild battles slowed in favor or more tactical ambushes and fast attacks. The town of Safe Haven, founded in the shard’s earliest days, be came a hot point of battle and conflict.

The town of Safe Haven was formed as a neutral ground for all players to meet and buy good from a variety of vendors. The rule was no fighting in SH, everyone is welcome. This broke down as determined grief players forced the formation of Safe Haven defenses. Fighting occurs nightly between attackers and defenders.

Outside of Safe Haven, limited Faction fighting raged and guild wars continue unabated. Numerous events occur from battles to control the Shadowclan’s Keep to helping lost people with purple names find mysterious objects.

Currently, an election is taking place in Safe Haven for Mayor. The topic of mayor is at the top of the discussion on the shard’s “war” messageboards at battlevortex.com. Take a look at the candidates. BTW, the current mayor is Vaniir, a former PK and member of GC, now leader Temple of the Ronin.

Debain Zataurous – former PK, advocates a strong defense with no mercy for SH enemies

Kelly Kindred – advocate of relaxing the laws and for having tolerance on how people play the game.

Gorg’da’guud – a partially deaf Shadowclan orc, advocates razing most Safe Haven buildings and putting and end to the human’s practice of eating their children.

Ammar of NAO – member of an outlaw hillbilly guild that advocates reducing the fighting and encouraging the vendors.

Glendor – leader of a anti-grief player guild, advocates the reduction of fighting and the increase of shard wide events.

Of these candidates, most of them are red. All of them engage in roleplay and are backed by groups in the various PvP alliances on the shard.

I submit to you that Siege Perilous, “the hard shard”, it actually the last bastion of real roleplay in Ultima Online. Without the artificial restrictions of Trammel and stat loss, the importance of guilds, alliances, and fights, takes on importance to players in the game. Where else can groups claim and defend territory? Where else are the top PvP guilds also strict roleplay guilds? Where else are players judged by their actions and not their hue? Where else do the large guilds fund a guild run specifically for the benefit of new players and PKs avoid attacking these new players?

On Siege Perilous you find the player justice and real diplomacy that has been lost in most online games. For the shard that was viewed as “PK heaven”, it has become anything but.

I have been asked by people for a holiday wish list. As a confirmed procrastinator, I have put it off until today. Yesterday, I was threatened with coal in a stocking. As a result, I wrote up a list.

I assumed you voyeurs, greedy for any bit of new data will want to see it too.

I present to you, my holiday wish list.

Here is a well reasoned arguement as to why the www. is necessary. Of course he's wrong, but it's a good try.

I post it as he sent it. Too bad America's college students can't spell.


RE: December 1st posting at http://www.pusateri.org/cruft/index.shtml

Ohhh, youve touched on a topic that I have strong opinions about so I have to rant. I know that you know most of the following information, in fact I know you know ALL of the presented information but it's nessacary for me to fully demonstrate my point so bear with me. :-)

The www. in web addresses is NOT redundant. To demonstrate this let's disect a Universal Resource Locator (URL) shall we?

Take for example the following url:
http://www.pusateri.org/cruft/index.shtml

http://
This part of the URL tells whatever client you are using what protocol to use. In this case the client is told to use http (hyper text transfer protocol). This is important because the client or in this case web browser knows what language to speak to the remote computer with.

www.pusateri.org
This is the address of the remote machine you are trying to reach stored in little-endian order. Since it is little-endian it would make sense to investigate this piece of the URL from right to left.

.org
The .org reffers to the top level domain (TLD) this is used for a clasification defining what type of orginization this "domain" belongs to.
In this case it is a non profit orginization.

.pusateri
The .pusateri defines the domain. This is the name of your realm, kinda liek an office building or neighborhood. It defines a cluster of machines that are all associated with the same orginization.

www
FINALLY the www part defines which machine within that "neighborhood" or "domain" the client should contatct about this particular request. It's like the number on your house or the last for digits of your phone number. It is the last step in narrowing the search down to one particular computer. In this case it stands for World Wide Web, usually signaling that that computer is indeed a web server.

/cruft/index.shtml
This part tells the client what file to ask for once it has contacted the appropriate computer. In this case it is "index.shtml" in the directory named "cruft".

As you can see demonstrated here the URL was desigined with flexability and scalability in mind. Each componet in the URL playing a important and key role. The www signifier is key in finding which computer is the one reciving the request. This identifier, also know as a hostname is a inergral part of the Doman Name Service (DNS) system which allows us to eaisly find computers on the network. Far easier than rembering numbers such as 208.54.123.222. If it were not for hostnames we would have to rember shuch numbers.

Although the world wide web has come to represent much of the internet in recent years it is important to remember that the web is NOT the internet. It is only part of the bigger picture that is the internet as a whole. The
URL was desigined as a way to easily locate any resource anywhere on the internet and each part of it was carefully thought out and 100% nesscarray to finding the location of that resource. It's not just for web addresses, in fact it is worng to assume that the web is the only use for a URL. Let's not strip it of it's robustness just because people are too lazy to type 4 extra charters.

Just try finding the office of joe blow in one million square feet of cubicles without numbers or orginized designation of some sort. Getting rid of the www is the meta equivilent of having only one cube on every floor of that building. It would a waste of resources and throwing out the window the robustness and forethought that the fathers of DNS and the URL so thoughtfully built in for us to use. Let's not take that for granted.

That's my take on why it is fundumentaly wrong to take the www out of web address urls. The more standards compliant we can keep the web the better off we are. We have enough problems with web browsers con conforming to W3C HTML standards as it is. In fact Opera is best browser we've got as far as being standards compliant and roughly 1/3 of the websites out there are complealy unseable in Opera.

Standards compliancy is a real problem on the web, let's not encourge this kind of irresponsible behavior.

I hope I have swayed your opinion somewhat on this issue or at least presented a logical and resonable counter argument to your opinion. Feel free to post this message on cruft if you so desire.

-James

One of the web sites I read is Geeknews as in geeknews.com. I was at a computer and wanted to check the news, so instead of clicking a link, I typed in geeknews, then I pondered, was geeknews a .net or a .com? I guess for geeknews.net and got a different site. At first I though they had changed designed or something. They both have Geekcam and slashdot style news on nerdly topics. For grins, I typed in geeknews.org and viola, another geeknews site. Heaven help us when ICANN allows even more TLDs, I don't know how many geeknews sites I can follow.

One more point. Get rid of the stupid www. in web address, it is so redundant, it pains me.