Written June 2008
By Cliff Feldwick
Ever wonder where the name Wikipedia came from? After all, if you google something nowadays, almost 80% of the time one of the top entries will be from Wikipedia. Following it to its roots produces the kernel that “Wiki wiki” in Hawaii means “quick”, but that’s no real explanation. Turns out the idea, and the software to make it possible, were developed in 1995 by someone wishing to build a collaborative page that could be used to share text and ideas, and it mushroomed from there. If you look at the original WikiWikiWeb (at www.wiki.org) you can see the history and download free software so you can create the same yourself, or add to the endless forums available. So a “wiki” is a web page that allows people to add or edit pages as they wish. Some companies are trying this as in-house ways to share knowledge, but I bet they may get more interesting comments than they want. That’s why it’s always good to have an editor in charge if you try it.
Humor for the way-too-much-time-crowd
Gene Weingarten, a humor columnist for the Washington Post, is a personal hero. How wonderful to get paid for having weird thoughts. Anyway, one of his features is “Googlenopes” – a phrase that, when enclosed in parenthesis, produces no hits. It’s harder than you think. Prior Googlenopes have included “much to Paris Hilton’s embarrassment”, “the yodeling librarian” and “the best pork chops in Jerusalem”. Of course, once a column is published (even this one) that phrase is history. Then it may become a “Googlewhack” – something that has one and only one hit.
Yes, I say “even this one” because some years ago I found myself quoted on some British economics site for my definition of “burn rate” – the euphemistic term of the then dot-coms for “losses”. Just shows you how far some web crawlers will go for links.
Anyway, having too much time one evening, I tried “nuns gone wild” on Google. You guessed it – 2590 matches, most of them books or humor columns, etc (no videos). I then tried “nerds gone wild” and got over 15,900 hits, including a NerdsGoneWildMagazine.com (on-line, of course), that had features like “nerd wheels” – including a “Jaws truck” that looks like, well, a shark and a giant Pac-man drag racer.
So what produced no hits? “Financial planners gone wild”. Guess some people are even more boring than nerds.
XP goes on and on
OK, now we’re really going to stop selling XP. No, well, perhaps after June of 2008. But trust me, we’re really going to stop selling it this time. Just watch – really, it’s going to happen. Promise.
That by the way, is the official Microsoft position on XP sales. I’ve said more than enough on this, but warn people that Microsoft will, some day, really mean it. Maybe buy your systems now.
Also by the way, there is a known bug in XP’s just-released SP-3 (service pack) that affects HP systems with AMD processors, causing an “endless re-boot” cycle. Intel CPU’s are fine. How do you know what you have? Right-click on My Computer, choose Properties, then the Hardware tab and the Device Manager button. Then click on Processor. It will show what’s inside. If it’s an AMD, then wait for HP’s bug fix before contemplating the upgrade.
Ah, but that it might really happen
A judge in California imposed a $230 million fine on “spam king” Sanford Wallace and his partner, as well as $4.7 million in attorney’s fees (and you think your divorce was expensive) after they were sued by MySpace and failed to show up in court. The kings had sent over 735,000 messages to MySpace users, including links to pornography and phishing scams. Wallace, by the way, had previous convictions for exploiting vulnerabilities in Windows to install Smartbot.net spyware. How much MySpace will actually recover from these idiots (well, very smart but not nice people) is open to question. Wallace was required to give up $4 million in “ill gotten gains” after a 2006 lawsuit – no word on whether that ever actually happened.
Microsoft + Yahoo = MicroHoo
In the latest version of the Microsoft buying Yahoo to counter Google blitz, MS is trying to buy Google’s search engine only, while Google keeps it’s European business but licenses everything else to a garage owner somewhere in Pakistan (OK, that might not be true – but its far too close). The original deal was close to $44 million, but the new one is for just $21 mil. As noted by “Cranky Geeks” columnist John Dvorak (another personal hero), for the original price they could have bought Ford and General Motors, renamed the cars “Google Sucks” (“Yes, officer, it was a red Google Sucks convertible headed west”) and still had $14 mil left over. Stay tuned, I guess. Just shows that some companies have too much money on hand.
Cliff Feldwick is president of Riverside Computer Consultants, and does networking, troubleshooting and other techno-wienie things for small companies, when not contemplating interesting combinations of company names. He can be reached at 410-880-0171 or at cliff@feldwick.com.