technomancy

The last remnant of CompuServe, the first major commercial online service, has been shut down by its current owner, AOL.

I was never a user -- I started on BBSes (back in the glory dayes of FidoNet), then became a USENET addict around 1990 when I got access as a student at the U of MD. (And then right around the time I finished grad school there was this new thing called the "World Wide Web" starting up...) But CompuServe had an important place in the history of networking, and technophiles should pause a moment in memorium.

For many years, I've been railing against "top posting" -- creating e-mail (or similar) messages with quoted material from the previous messages (usually, the entire message, unabridged) in the thread at the bottom, and the added content at the top of the message. I just stumbled across this perfect little illustration of why it's a horrid practice:

A: Yes.
> Q: Are you sure?
>> A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation
>>> Q: Why is top posting annoying in email?

Dan's Mail Format Site has more on the evils of top posting -- and, more importantly, how to do it right with interleaving and bottom-posting.

On Tuesday, for about two hours Indianapolis' Methodist Hospital had to send incoming ambulances to other hospitals. Why? A power surge knocked out their computer system (bad design part 1), and patients' records had to be hand entered. They couldn't deal with the backlog (bad design part 2).

It looks more and more like electronic health records are going to work as well as electronic voting.

It's such a rarity to encounter good customer service. We ought to mention it more often.

I had two good experiences in the past few weeks.

The weekend before last I rented a wood chipper at the Catonsville ABC Rental Center. The delivery charge had gone up a lot since I last did this a few years ago, but the woman behind the counter halved the charge since I live close by. Then, when I had an issue -- couldn't get the motor started after shutting it down for a break -- they gave me the choice of another session with it, or just charging me for a half-day instead of a whole one. I was pleased.

And I recently ordered a fan from Mouser Electronics, to repair my bug zapper. It apparently got broken in transit. No problem at all, they're sending me a replacement, not asking me to return the old one, and not charging shipping on the replacement.

I also want to mention that I've mostly had good luck with Dish Network customer service -- I've been able to speak to knowledgeable people whose native language seems to be English, a combination becoming more and more rare on help lines for tech products and services.

A five-foot Ethernet cable might run you about $20 at Best Buy. Less if you shop around on-line or get a bargain-basement cable. A cheapo cable is more likely to fail, but once you get up to a decent quality Category 6 cable, a cable is a cable is a cable.

But the folks at Denon actually have the gall to charge $499 for their AK-DL1 "proprietary ultra premium Denon Link cable". It's got all the bells and whistles: even "signal directional markings are provided for optimum signal transfer." (Presumably the electrons read the markings to figure out which way to go, because moving under a voltage is just so out of style.)

Worse is that there are people who would buy this, the same sort of "audiophiles" who buy Monster cables and Brilliant Pebbles

More at Wired's Gadget Lab.

No, it's not a April Fool's joke: the Wall Street Journal reports on researchers who are trying to adapt technology from the old "Star Wars" laser missile defense, to target mosquitoes with death rays. If it works, it would be much less toxic and much more selective than insecticides.

LiveScience reports that researchers at the Scripps Research Institute have created molecules that bump right up against the boundaries of what we consider "alive". They synthesized RNA enzymes that replicate, mutate, and evolve:

Lincoln's advisor, professor Gerald Joyce, reiterated that while the self-replicating RNA enzyme systems share certain characteristics of life, they are not life as we know it.

"What we've found could be relevant to how life begins, at that key moment when Darwinian evolution starts," Joyce said in a statement.

Joyce's restraint, clear also on an NPR report of the finding, has to be appreciated. He allows that some scientists familiar with the work have argued that this is life. Another scientist said that what the researchers did is equivalent to recreating a scenario that might have led to the origin of life.

Joyce insists he and Lincoln have not created life: "We're knocking on that door," he says, "but of course we haven't achieved that."

Brendan Gregg, from Sun's "Fishworks" team, demonstrates how shouting at a disk drive causes vibrations that cause latency (i.e., slows down the process of accessing stuff from the disk). Wild.

Majel Barrett Roddenberry has left us.

Majel played the Enterprise's first officer in the original pilot "The Cage" (later recut with a frame story as the TOS two-parter "The Menagerie"), then Nurse Christine Chapel in the original series. Then in TNG she played Councilor Troi's mother, Lwaxana, as well as providing the ubiquitous computer voice in TNG and later series. In fact, she has recenntly finished voice work on the forthcoming Trek movie.

She and Gene Roddenberry married two months after the final episode of Star Trek was aired. (According to Memory Alpha, they were in Japan and has a "Shinto-Buddhist" wedding!)

After Gene's death she did a lot to preserve the Star Trek legacy, and also worked as executive producer on two shows based on ideas from his archives, Earth: Final Conflict and Andromeda.

Here's why the American Century is over: while our "best" minds are busy Twittering about what they had for lunch and playing Guitar Hero, Chinese farmers with little education are building armies of walking robots. How do you say "Bite my shiny metal ass" in Mandarin?