May 2001

thedumb.com is about dumb laws, facts, and warnings.

While on the subject of movies, the animation film Shrek is supposed to be pretty good.

Spielberg’s next movie, A.I., has sparked a weird game. I read the article on it at ZDNet and searched for Jeanine Salla, listed as the movie’s sentient machine therapist, which lead me to her site, (at the so called “Bangalore World University”!!) and from there to others… it really is a wierd game. Those with enthu, do try it and let me know your progress.

Cool Site of the Day: another way to learn about interesting sites. Google recommends Netscape’s new and cool, USA Today hot sites, The Internet Tourbus, and the Glassdog.

Subjex, like Ask Jeeves, handles searches in plain English.

Cybelle lives in AgentLand. She’s 100% virtual (having admitted it, she asked if I was disappointed), and guides people through their site. It’s a new and interesting way of having a search engine on a site.

Why do people say “Bless you” when you sneeze? The practise may date back to the plague in London, though there are several theories.

I have joined the Boston Consulting Group at Mumbai.

The subject-specific Scout reports, which were a prime source of my information, are about to be discontinued from the end of the month. (No funds.)

Why is America named after Amerigo Vespucci, and not Columbus? Perhaps because Vespucci reached there first. Or perhaps he marketed America better. Ironic.

George Gilder proposes that while Moore’s law drove the IT revolution through processing power, today it’s bandwidth that’s driving it – through Gilder’s Law. This ties back to what an Economist survey says about focus shifting from software to online services.

eBay will delist items associated with Nazis, Ku Klux Klan, etc. Yahoo is cleaning its porn content. AOL is, however, using neural networks to automatically filter content.

There’s a lot you can do using e-mail, including upload FTP files, create home pages, send snail-mail, translate languages, play games (blank e-mail), send a fax (no subject, “help” in body), track webpage changes, etc. The full details are available at the Accessing the Internet by Email FAQ

I just realised that website search engines aren’t the only place you can search for information. There’re search engines for FAQs, webrings, mailing lists, newsgroups, encyclopaedias.

The Economist suggests that just as focus of the computer industry shifted from hardware to software, it is now shifting from software to online services. Which means that the computer (hardware and software) will commoditize and only web services will make money.

Ellen won a spam case against Kozmo. If you get unsolicited e-mail from a company, you can sue them. Unless they have an opt-out mechanism.

The US Budget is online.

There’s a portal for “404 Not Found” error messages.

Scientists have decided not to publish in journals that do not make their archives available for free. Cheers!

Acrobat Reader 5 is out. Nothing great, unless you have a Palmtop, or use Asian characters.