2005: Year of the Walrus

From urbandictionary.com:

Geek, n. Someone who you beat up in high school, and end up working for in later life.

Absolutely false. Geeks fantasize that "the geeks shall inherit the earth," when in fact they shall come nowhere near it. Geeks have knowledge and skill-sets, but the socially intelligent and aggressive shall inherit the earth, as they've done for centuries, and will do so by manipulating geeks' skills to accomplish their own goals. Never forget that the "pointy-haired boss" is, of course, Dilbert's boss.

Many geeks are Libertarians because they are unwilling/unable to lead, but of course don't like to take orders themselves. So, the solution is to propose a magical, fantasy society in which 10,000 years of hierarchical human behavior simply vanishes.

Geeks will never be in charge, nor will they inherit the earth -- they don't have the balls or the charm. They'll simply work in their cubicles, programming, and grumpily and snidely whisper about their bosses. Blacksmiths weren't the kings of England -- the kings of England were the kings of England.

24 jul 05

I saw a funny "Google News" glitch this evening. Maybe this is why the "BETA" disclaimer still lingers on the "Google News" logo:

The top, breaking news story from around the world is, as you can see, "Why does this page look this way?" Apparently, the New York Times's dhtml didn't play nice with Google's news-crawler bot.

Before I arrived at that conclusion, I wondered for a fraction of second if the number-one headline in world news might really be "Why does this page look this way?." My confusion was brief, but I'm not going to deny that it set in, if only momentarily.

Why Does This Page Look This Way?

July 24th, 2005

Web-surfers today took a long-in-coming, contemplative look at their browser windows, and didn't like what they saw. Flash interfaces that look like they were developed on Pluto. Superfluous Javascript, generating endless little pull-down menus and screwy form-fields that don't respond to the "enter" key. Java Applets that tell time.

Confusing CSS (such as that which rips the line from beneath links, changes the cursor into a little crosshair, fudges around with the scroll-bars, etc). Cluttered design and unnecessarily complex tools that make getting useful information from a page difficult.

Why does this page look this way?

Fault might lie with vendors, who develop technologies that confound rather than facilitate information exchange. Or, maybe the problem is designers', programmers' and managers' disjointed efforts and desperation to squeeze one more bit of information, one more advertisement, or one more hour of pay onto a web-page. Might users be to blame, for putting up with it all?

Perhaps one answer, perhaps the other, perhaps some combination, or perhaps Something Completely Different. These are complex analyses for complex times. However, the principal question remains: "Why does this page look this way?" It's a question that may very well remain unanswered in any simple, satisfactory way.

Sorry, that was pretty lame.

I suspect that bad web-design of this sort is, as I suggested in my dumb fake-article, ultimately the product of commercialism, and too many cooks in the kitchen.Vendors like Macromedia develop web add-ons because they have R&D departments employing workers who need to earn paychecks, and then they push these add-ons because they have marketing departments employing similar workers.

Web-designers need jobs, too, and they need to justify their salaries by piddling around in Photoshop and writing Javascript, Flash and CSS all day. And, of course, the salaries of the web-designers have to come from somewhere (advertisements on a page).

The "too many capitalist cooks in the kitchen" explanation does pretty well at explaining any violation of Occam's Razor -- "X" is not as simple as it can and should be because there are a billion grubby little hands, clutching at money-wads, which get "X"'s surface all dirty and smudged.

"Too much stuff on a web-page" is a form of consumerism, the same phenomenon of excess that explains sport utility vehicles and big-screen television sets: if money can be made by selling a thing, then more and bigger money can be made by selling more and bigger things.

Crowding pages up with a lot of crap isn't helpful to information interchange. This is why some people yearn for the days of Gopher (not me).

22 jul 05

The domain "poop.us" is for sale.

You might be thinking "Why did he type 'poop.us' in his location bar in the first place?" I can explain. Just now I read an article detailing the imminent release of Microsoft's new operating system, and Microsoft's switch from referring to it with the code-word "Longhorn" to using its new, actual name, "Vista."

Microsoft has registered the associated domain-name "WindowsVista.us," which got me thinking about the .us extension, and how the number of domains registered under it might compare to the number registered under .com. One of my first ideas was to try out "poop.us," curious as to whether or not it was taken (probably), and, if so, where it might point.

Poop.us is taken, and for sale. Its attached web-page tells us that this domain is owned and offered by Afternic.com, which seems to be solely a domain-peddling company; researchers employed by Afternic dream up domain-names all day, register them for $10, and then Afternic sells them for twice, ten times, or a thousand times the registration fee.

I believe this was a common practice during the Dot Com Boom (RIP), but I'm not sure that people care so much about rare, prized domain names anymore. However, some are apparently still clinging to the practice in this day and age. There are about 750,000 words (and growing) in the English language, and forty or so available domain extensions. So, there are estimably 2,250,000,000,000 (two trillian, two-hundred fifty billion and some) possible, reasonably memorable domain names consisting of a two-word sequence (such as morbidcrustacean.nu, portlycow.cc, etc), neither of which are registered.

But who am I to assume Afternic isn't making any money? When I made them an offer of $10 (knowing that it'd be far too low -- I have no desire to own "poop.us"), I received a message stating that the minimum bid is $550.

Underneath that message was another, explaining that interested parties have the option of buying a "purchase appraisal" for $19.95 to help determine a "reasonable" price for this domain. I don't quite understand this, since the minimum bid is already stated, and Afternic are the ones selling both the domain and the purchase appraisal. So, the question is: will the new, researched and appraised price of "poop.us" exceed $531.05? If so, prospective owners should place the already-stated minimum bid. If not, better go with the appraisal.

I'm torn.

Re-seller companies would be wise to list, next to each offered domain, the number of times it had been accessed by people (like me) considering it and typing it in their location bars. This, of course, would be a good indication as to the value of the domain. $PRICE = $REASONABLE_NUMBER * $TIMES_ACCESSED.

Note that "poop.us" falls under the category of "adult/general" domains. Clicking on that associated link launches a page that lists some other funny domains, all of them for sale at reasonable prices. For example: "scrota.com" for $2,000, and "ScoldMe.com" for $1,500. These are examples of Afternic's asking price. Unfortunately for Afternic, the highest bid often falls short of this. For instance, "copulatory.com" is priced at $77,777.77, whereas the top bid for this domain is $77.77.

One can also find funny domains and their sale-prices on Ebay and Craigslist, such as, ironically, "GetRichSlowly.com" for $2,500,000. That'd be a good start to getting rich slowly.

21 jul 05

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