Showing posts with label Internet Guru. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Internet Guru. Show all posts
Friday, June 16, 2006
Commoncraft. For an e-ignoramus like me.
Try as I may, I have not really managed as yet to get a firm grip on some of the web-related ‘techie' stuff that I ought to be able to roll off the tip of my tongue to pass off as a venerable Internet guru. Ask me to define RSS or Trackback or Wiki offhand and chances are you’ll find me tongue-tied. Yes, I have written about these things in my Hindustantime.com column (QuiteATake.com by Deepak Mankar) from time to time but only with the help of the technical stuff I can refer to on various websites. I was much relieved to find Commoncraft. It explains this kind of stuff in easy-to-understand non-techie lingo. http://www.commoncraft.com/archives/cat_technology_in_plain_english.html. Whew!
What’s your favourite conspiracy theory?
Do you believe in conspiracy theories? Like the one that got Mel Gibson into hot waters in Conspiracy Theory? You know, the "there's a big cover-up involving the US Government and a ham-handed, bumbling CIA" sort?
In the fifties and the sixties, there used to be stories that G-Men in Black cropped up out of nowhere every time there was an "incidence" involving UFOs and aliens and muddied the water so much that, in the end, no one knew what had really happened. (In the 1997 hit, Men in Black, Jay/Will Smith and Kay/Tommy Lee Jones had to wield their neuralyzers to deal with the scum of the intergalactic space, remember?) Read the script: http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Men-in-Black.html.
Now let me point you to the once-familiar Internet conspiracy theory with Microsoft as everybody’s favourite villain. At http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/comment/0,5859,2823588,00.html, you'll find a typical conspiracy theory scenario. It's about the control of – no, not intergalactic space – the Internet. The secret weapon – Windows XP and the bundled IE browser – were to be allegedly used by Microsoft in cahoots with the US Government to help it control the distribution of information over the Internet. (Don't forget Congress had by then already given the US Government unlimited electronic surveillance power.) The article, Microsoft: Too much control of the Web?, was written by the well-respected CEO of UserLand Software, Dave Winer, who kept a daily blog, "Scripting News," at http://www.scripting.com/.
In the fifties and the sixties, there used to be stories that G-Men in Black cropped up out of nowhere every time there was an "incidence" involving UFOs and aliens and muddied the water so much that, in the end, no one knew what had really happened. (In the 1997 hit, Men in Black, Jay/Will Smith and Kay/Tommy Lee Jones had to wield their neuralyzers to deal with the scum of the intergalactic space, remember?) Read the script: http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Men-in-Black.html.
Now let me point you to the once-familiar Internet conspiracy theory with Microsoft as everybody’s favourite villain. At http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/comment/0,5859,2823588,00.html, you'll find a typical conspiracy theory scenario. It's about the control of – no, not intergalactic space – the Internet. The secret weapon – Windows XP and the bundled IE browser – were to be allegedly used by Microsoft in cahoots with the US Government to help it control the distribution of information over the Internet. (Don't forget Congress had by then already given the US Government unlimited electronic surveillance power.) The article, Microsoft: Too much control of the Web?, was written by the well-respected CEO of UserLand Software, Dave Winer, who kept a daily blog, "Scripting News," at http://www.scripting.com/.
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