Cox Crow

A memorial to the Bell System: the world's largest computer.

5:16:46 PM #
categories: Industry

Provider of Network-Aware Applications, not Provider of Network

John Robb talks about the differences between "broadband" ISPs and Old-Style ISPs. Let's cut out the confusing "service provider" jargon crap and call it like it is. There are software vendors and network vendors. Network vendors sell you a line and lease you an address. Software vendors sell you software, whether as a service or not doesn't much matter — unless you are a confused software vendor who doesn't recognize that you no longer need to offer access as well as software. Or if you're a network vendor who thinks that the applications are in the network.

4:23:18 PM # Google It!
categories: Industry

Is the world a better place with shorter and fuzzier memories of personal shortcomings and failures?
[diJEST: a journal of extrapreneurial strategy and technology]

Yes.

3:16:50 PM #
categories: Identity

something Jenett said about sand

2:33:15 PM #

At the Mercy of a Fickle God

The Big Sister plays with the computer at the library while waiting for story time to begin. She's become quite the little mouseketeer (mouser?). At home she sits at the computer, powering the system up, putting it to sleep, clicking around the login screen, and so forth. She pretends to schedule appointments for Mommy

That's Cox, spelled see oh ecks?

I marvel at how resilient the Apple is with handling power events. I can't imagine this Dell responding well to power on, sleep, power on, sleep, power off, power on, sleep, power on, all in the course of two minutes.

2:08:17 PM # Google It!
categories: Family

Not Bearing the Costs

In discussing Club vs. LoJack Solutions to the spam problem, Mark Pilgrim neglects to mention Option 4: Retribution. If the consequences of spam were inappropriately severe — like, say, a bullet to the brain — then the odds of spam being sent would be significantly lowered. That assumes that one would be able to conclusively identify, prosecute, and terminate the spammer.

The problem is that these anti-social behaviors have low or miniscule costs associated with them. So you spam someone, so what? Nothing happens to you.

1:50:20 PM # Google It!

A World of Possibility

Why don't Yahoo Calendar, Prodigy Calendar, or Netscape Calendar support data exchange by means of vCal/iCal? Isn't that what a standard is for?

And speaking of data exchange, I don't have a PDA and can barely mangle the UI on my cell phone. But now that we're travelling someplace where timing is important, I want one. And I want to be able to load it with data from this schedule. And load a GPS device with the maps.

12:33:39 PM # Google It!

A Simple Join

David Fletcher points out Maporama. I like this one. MapQuest used to provide the latitude and longitude for the point mapped, as part of the graphic, but stopped doing that. Maporama provides it, in text!

Paul Shane and I once discussed linking phone numbers to GPS information. Towns pay big bucks to do this for 911 implementations. Emergency services should be able to find their way to the emergency given just a phone number, if necessary. We were disappointed to find that while MapQuest provided latitude and longitude, and let you search by them, it did not provide a means to search by phone number. Nor do Maporama or Yahoo! Maps. What Google does is join the information in the telephone directory with the information in the geographic directory, mapping a phone number to a place, or a place to its phone number.

Can you imagine how joining these databases could change caller identification? Ignoring the unreliability of the Caller ID information for the moment, consider what you could do with CTI at home. Suppose your phone could speak to your computer, and you have a persistent Internet connection. A call comes in, carrying Caller ID data. Your system takes the data, maps the phone number to an address and a name, shows you where the call originated, checks your address book for more personal information, locates the web site related to the calling number, and the next thing you know you're watching the web cam of the little twit who thinks he's being funny by prank calling during dinner.

But then, that's a typical CTI fantasy.

9:18:11 AM # Google It!
categories: Directories, Industry