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Site Seeing
By JULES ALLEN Favorite waste of timeGordon Moore, former chairman of Intel, launched a thought that has been a mainstay of the computer industry. The idea is that processor speed doubles every 18 months and costs half as much as it previously did. So far it's been pretty much on the mark. And how do we apply this wonder of modern living? With Web sites such as this. It's not really artificial intelligence but more of an expert system. By answering yes or no to myriad questions, this site will guess the TV show or film you're thinking of. It got The A Team and Who's Line Is It Anyway? pretty quickly but totally missed the 1999 cult film The Castle. A wonderful way to fritter away a Monday morning and much better than work. Ssh! Cheap and secureToday's Web sites are a far call from the lifeless, flat HTML versions of the early years of the Web. Any site that offers a modicum of interactivity is usually driven by a database these days. Sadly, many interactive Web sites are poorly built or their owners make poor technology choices during construction. This is why we hear stories of credit card theft and people's reluctance to shop online. While you can't control what your favorite shopping site does, you can make a smart online storage choice such as that from Hush Communications. For $2.99 a month, you can have 25 megabytes of all-but-crackable Net-based storage. All through a simple-to-use Web interface. Gripe lineI was going to plop in a link to Dave Barry's recent and quite hysterical column on living with Windows. But by the time you'd correctly typed in the humongous Web address, Godot might well have arrived, had some lunch and left again. Instead, here's a blistering review of popular programs that just don't behave very well on a Windows computer. This might not solve your Windows problem but you'll know you're not the only one with issues. As a bonus, you can click off to Barry's column because it's currently linked from the home page. Think of it as double the entertainment with half of the typing. New WindowsSome people want the elitist snobbery that goes with owning a Mac OS X computer but want the vast array of software that runs under Windows. The plain old Windows interface, even the gooey eye candy of XP with its alpha channels, just isn't exclusive enough for these folks. So enter WinStep. It's a bolt-on that replaces your Windows user interface with something that a Linux junkie could adore. It's not for everybody and you'll certainly get no support from Microsoft if you install this. But it certainly looks the part. Smack head, repeat if necessaryI hate spammers and I'm sure you do, too. So far this year I've received a little more than 2,000 junk e-mails offering everything from oddly flavored porn to floor wax. And I've even had a few resumes sent my way. None from the hapless Bernard Shifman, though. If you've got an adult sense of humor and don't mind the odd colorful word, this site is fabulously entertaining.
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From Tech Times
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