Links

In 1900, David Hilbert outlined 23 unsolved problems in mathematics. Many of these have been solved today, with the notable exception of the Riemann Hypothesis. Today, if we solve any of these, we get $1 million.

I’ve always liked devices attached to the Internet. Web cameras are a hot favourite. Earthcam is a portal for web cameras. Google has more webcam directories.

Wanted Joseph Bosco, for the crime of ogling at girls in Sweden and not even writing to me about it. Better do so quickly before someone searches for your name and finds it on my site!

A guy called Baumgartner at the RPI set up a site that lets people auction their votes. Users of Gnutella (and Napster) are free-riding. People are faking videos real-time. Author’s reviews are forged. Life in the 21st century doesn’t look promising ;-)

The Economist has an article on The failure of new media – about how the Internet’s a disappointment. In fact they have lots of articles on the Internet.

Amazon.com moved retailers to the web, and disintermediated retail inventory. SimonSays.com is a publisher (Simon & Schuster) on the Web. Stephen King’s an author on the Web. You can buy his book from him directly, and online. He’s releasing The Plant in installments. Each installment will be about a dollar. That’s pretty cheap for an online book, but then, he only has server storage and tracking costs and all that. He says he’ll stop writing the next part if people don’t pay enough. Payment rate is over 75% so far. This is an experiment to watch.

AstaLaVista is an ‘underground search engine’. I’d been there before, and since its survived this long, it must be good.

Don’t know what a web log is? It’s a site where people talk – usually about the Web. Some are discussions. Some are moderated. Some are narratives – like mine. Scripting news is my favourite, and SlashDot’s another popular one. Blogger’s the most popular, I hear.

I-DNS looks like a great concept. You can register a domain name in any language. Localized Internet is taking off like mad.

inc.com has lots of good articles on anything to do with business – business plans, customer service, e-commerce, law, strategy, etc. Especially their guides.

An update on the Internet cable scenario.

The IT Act will be implemented in September. We’re just done with our business proposal. If we rush in now, we may be just in time to get a first mover advantage. But we’re losing the lead each day. Read about itsvalidated.com.

These days I need to search a lot for images. images.altavista.com and gallery.yahoo.com have proven very handy. To me, it seems Altavista’s the eternal innovator, and gives away its lead to Yahoo. They came up with the image service first (and its still better). But their babelfish language translator is still one of its kind.

Why do we drive on the left? The medieval nobility wielded their sword on the right (mostly), and rode on the left, so as to chop off oncoming horsemen. Peasants walked on the right to avoid the swords. While the New Scientist’s last word reveals why Napolean drove on the right, it’s not clear why Americans do. Kevin Lowey has a different opinion, though.

What’s more of a rage than profitable dot-coms? Bankrupt dot-coms, as listed by dotcomfailures, startupfailures, and fuckedcompany. Scepticism’s gone far enough to make this web economy bullshit generator a great hit.

Direct Hit (from AskJeeves) is a search engine. Copernic is a software that searches multiple sites. Flyswat is a way of interfacing a messaging board with your browser. I’ve heard they’re all cool.

While hunting for some stuff on public relations on the Internet, I found 10 ways public relations specialists can use the Internet. Actually, the links are useful to anyone doing any news research. What’s Next Online, 12th July has a good writeup on how to research online. I did find some good Internet PR related links too on About.com, Connecting Online and Impulse Research.

Internet Telephony in India is legal. Some stories: 1 | 2 | 3

The latest browser stats say that 69% of the world uses, Internet Explorer, while only 27% use Netscape. BrowserWatch says 57%-26%. Netscape 6 might do something about it, given that Microsoft’s split.

With network-tools, you can find out where a particular computer is, who’s it registered with, and how information travels there.