family

Scenes from Belize

Posted on by Will Cox

We bought a new camera just before our cruise; here are some pictures.

a house for computers
A House for Computers

A house for computers in Data Park, by Intelco on the Northern Highway in Belize. Shortly down the road we saw

a house for people?
A House for People

a house for people on the intersection of the Northern Highway and the Old Northern Highway.

And this is what a Ford Aerostar looks like after it hits a bus.

crash between a Ford Aerostar and a bus

On our way back from Altun Ha we found this accident. In our tour group were three ER nurses. They saved the life of the Aerostar’s driver while the people in the neighborhood worked to pry the dash and door off. People are incredible.

as we came up on the bus

General

Posted on by Will Cox

pair Networks – Special Offers

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Sounds like a good deal!

Work

Posted on by Will Cox

“Yahoo tacks fees onto e-mail, storage features: The company said it will begin charging for a feature that lets people check their Yahoo e-mail messages from outside services. In addition, the company will limit public access to its data storage service in hopes of persuading people to pay for it.” [c|net]

Expect more of the same. As this goes on, SBC Yahoo will become the bargain.

Work

Posted on by Will Cox

SBC: We’ll hit our numbers: “The company said it plans to focus on building its operations in the United States by expanding into new markets such as long-distance voice and data services, Internet and wireless.”

Ah, expanding into the Internet market. I wonder how that works. 😉

General

Posted on by Will Cox

Yahoo sends MapQuest packing:

Yahoo said Wednesday that it has stopped using AOL Time Warner online street-finder unit MapQuest and has instead created its own mapping service.
Yahoo’s service, which continues to look and operate like the one powered by MapQuest, is built on data providecnd by Navigation Technologies, Geographic Data Technology, and software application providers Telcontar and Sagent Technology.

Work

Posted on by Will Cox

Jon’s Radio: “How do they do it? My theory: less time spent in meetings.”

ROFLMAO

At one time, SBC was intending to migrate their members’ personal home pages to our servers. Why didn’t it happen? I was only involved for six months, but the project had gone nowhere for 18 months before that: meetings, staff changes, more meetings, more staff changes, more meetings, and no deliveries.

I wonder how long will it take for SBC to migrate to Yahoo.

Books/communication/economics

Posted on by Will Cox

Andrew Sullivan: In fact, I’d argue, blogs could well be a milestone in the long history of journalism. By empowering individual writers, by reducing the costs of entry into publishing to close to zero, the blog revolution has only begun to transform the media world.

 

To write, the costs of entry are low, as soon as you become literate. To publish, however, the costs were high: ink, paper, and distribution. And so relatively few published. Now, the challenge is not to be published, but to be read.

law/Work

Posted on by Will Cox

BBC News | DOT LIFE | Why BT claims it owns the right to ‘click here’

A stronger case could be made if the defence could prove the patent was invalid because the invention was not original. Here Prodigy has a killer piece of evidence up its sleeve.

Prodigy’s unlikely saviour comes in the form of a fuzzy black and white video which shows a 1968 demonstration by Stanford computer researcher Douglas Engelbart apparently demonstrating hypertext linking.

 

Here’s the filed complaint.

Work

Posted on by Will Cox

Joel on Software:

When software companies say that “their capital assets go home every night,” they are serious. Dead serious. And when Quark goes down in flames because the bean-counters pushed out the experienced developers and hired new, cheaper ones 10 time zones away, there will be a great case study in Harvard Business Review to prove it.

The same applies to Internet Service Providers. It’s uncertain at this point whether anyone at SBC knows this.

law/Work

Posted on by Will Cox

Minnesota looks into switch of Qwest DSL users The state Commerce Department is investigating whether tens of thousands of Minnesotans have been treated fairly in the switch of Qwest high-speed Internet access customers to Microsoft’s MSN online service.

I would not be too surprised if something like this happens during the transfer of services from SBC Prodigy to Yahoo!

law/Work

Posted on by Will Cox

FCC News Release: FCC PROPOSES $6 MILLION FINE AGAINST SBC COMMUNICATIONS, INC. In approving the license transfers, the Commission required SBC to offer the shared transport unbundled network element in the former Ameritech states on terms at least as favorable as those offered to telecommunications carriers in Texas as of August 27, 1999. In today’s Notice, the Commission found that SBC appears to have violated this condition in each of the five former Ameritech states by attempting to restrict the use of shared transport by carriers providing intraLATA toll service. The $6 million fine proposed by the Commission is the statutory maximum for the five apparent violations (one in each of the former Ameritech states).

law/Work

Posted on by Will Cox

We’ve been sued.

BT, Prodigy U.S. hyperlink patent trial date set: BT owns what it calls the Hidden Page patent, which was filed in the U.S. in 1976, granted in 1989 and isn’t due to expire until 2006, giving the company the intellectual property rights to hyperlink technology. Hyperlinks connect text, images, and other data on the Internet in such a way as to allow a user to click on a highlighted object on a Web page in order to bring up an associated item contained elsewhere on the Web.

 

As far as I can tell, this patent applies just as well to symbolic links in the UNIX filesystem, Mac OS aliases, Windows shortcuts, anything written in Hypercard, anything with a GUI, menu-driven programs (smit, for example), an index, a b-tree, a detour sign, a table of contents in a printed book — or even a Socratic dialogue, which reveals the argument through questions.

To patent this is absurd.