"WHY?:
A jabber peer, peerA@serverA wishes to send a 12 megabyte file to peerB@serverB. The file is too large to send via email. Both peers are behind masqurading firewalls, virtually eliminating the possibility of peer to peer transfer via ICQ or FTP. Also, the receiving peer is on an unreliable connection, and transfers are often interrupted. PeerB is not online but needs the file for the weekend; peerA is about to leave for the weekend."

"SOLUTION?:
A computer, running an HTTP server, such as apache, hosts a CGI program which allows authenticated users to upload files. Uploaded files are placed in a directory/storage system not publicly accessable and indexed by a serial number. A password is generated for however many users are to download the file. The file is assigned an expiry date, so that some maintenance function on the server can clean old files up. The uploading peer then is informed by the server of the parameters which the server has set (passwords, serial number, expiry date, and URL of the access program [the CGI mentioned earlier]). The sender then sends a message via jabber (or some other mechanism) informing the recipient of URL, serial number, password, decryption info, etc. The user can then go get the file."

"Netscan provides a growing range of tools and visual interfaces to explore Usenet. Smith aims to provide interactive maps of Usenet to reveal just how successfully these [news]groups really are, to see a kind of satellite photo of a large swath of a social cyberspace."

"The Netscan project is ongoing, but some of its key findings thus far are that Usenet “...continues to grow rapidly, that it is a remarkably international system, that it is not all pornography” says Smith. Netscan clearly shows Usenet also hosts a diverse range of different communities with distinctive styles of social interaction from long running discussions to heated political arguments, to simple job listings, file sharing, and Q&A technical support groups."

"Adding VoiceXML to your Web site can be an effective way to make your content accessible to many more customers. This is Part I of a comprehensive tutorial on the VoiceXML specification, so get ready to have some fun and be sure to come back for Part II where we will develop a complete dynamic VoiceXML application. In this tutorial, we will create and launch our first live VoiceXML application in a few simple steps."

"People settled at Cholula, around a pond located under the present pyramid, in the late centuries BC. Cholula is therefore one of the oldest continuously- occupied cities in the western hemisphere, perhaps the oldest."

"In 1519, Hernando Cortés came to Cholula with a large army of Tlaxcalans, who camped outside town while Cortés and his soldiers put up in a palace located on the west side of Blvd Miguel Alemán between 5th and 7th Streets. He wanted the Cholulans to help him attack Tenochtitlán. They sent a messenger to Montezuma, asking what he would think if they killed the Spaniards. Montezuma didn't have a problem with that..."

"Imperialism is the factor in American policy, not just since 1898, but in fact long before it when we were expanding across this continent and taking away Indian lands in order to enlarge the territory of the United States. We have been an imperial power and an expansionist power for a very long time. It will continue regardless of whether we have Republican or Democratic administrations in power. In fact, it's hard to tell who would be more likely to further the ends of imperialism. The Democrats or the Republicans, Bush or Gore? I mean yes, in domestic policy you can find some differences among them. Look at the appointments to the Attorney General, environmental affairs, and so on....but in foreign policy, it's very hard to find a difference."

"...deja could get a message from post to archive in under 20 seconds; google currently does it in, um, 36 hours. i watched several deja engineers optimize that down to 20 seconds -- it took them almost 2 years to get it that fast. is google going to be willing to invest that much time and energy, for something that isn't even their core product? what about all the time deja put into spam protection? gone. posting interface? gone. five years of bookmarks, all over the world's browsers and web sites? gone, and without any good way to restore or redirect them, ever. email services? gone. personalization software, saved groups, tracked threads? all gone."

"How much did you pay to Deja.com for this access that saves you all these hours? Nothing, you say? How strange, then, that their business model didn't lead to profitability or even survival. How strange, also, that Google wouldn't want to incorporate and support the codebase of a company that couldn't turn these resources into profit. The expectation of free stuff is starting to decline, but this guy's gut reaction reveals how much we've been lulled into it."

"Mathie humour was identified as the sense of humour shared by those in the process of attaining a degree in Mathematics. People who are working on degrees in Science or Applied Science, even if their department is Mathematics, may not share the same sense of humour. People who have achieved their degrees and are no longer students may not share the same sense of humour, probably because they are no longer subject to courses with wierd profs, late night assignment-work and cramming, and don't waste as much time playing card or board games with other students. "

"The free software and open source movements, for example, love to talk about licensing, which is really a set of social contracts that attempt to reconcile ideas about the nature of software with ideas about the nature of business. That's what's happening between culture and infrastructure, at the governance level of the chart. If you want proof of the cultural nature of open source and free software licensing, consider these two facts: Not one of these licenses has ever been tested in a court of law; and Not one business has dared to try. I think that's evidence of civilized behavior by both the hacker and the business communities.

I think we're only beginning to discover, right here where we make infrastructure, that what's most human about business is what each of us does for all of us."

"Anyway, we wanted to put together something quickly and we all love Google so we decided to pay homage to the best of class search engine with the simple layout. Use BlogFinder to see if people have mentioned your blog in theirs, or use it for more noble pursuits like finding out what people are saying about a breaking news story."

"If you've paid any attention to the web standards discussions, you may have heard the phrase "Semantic Web", or perhaps even been pressured to use standards with names like "Dublin Core Metadata" or "RDF". If you've attempted to read any of the available documentation on these topics, you were probably intimidated by terms such as "reify" and all sorts of artificial intelligence concepts. This document attempts to explain what all of this chatter really means, and help you decide which parts you should care about and why. I have tried to use common-sense, real-world examples and stay away from complicated terminology."

"Amazon customers may not know it, but stored on their personal computers are little pieces of software code called cookies that let Amazon identify them when they visit Amazon.com's site. This can be helpful, because it lets the company recognize a return visitor and lets customers avoid re-typing all their information when they want to buy something.

Under the Honor System, Amazon will be able to learn when its customers are visiting third-party sites using the service -- whether or not the Amazon customers click on the notice on those third-party sites. This is a fairly dramatic increase in Amazon's ability to learn things about its customers -- a windfall of information the company can and surely will use to sell things more effectively."

"Let's rebuild around this new model John, the Internet is a two-way medium, more like the telephone than the printing press or TV."

"I don't know your feelings on the matter, but I have mixed feelings about what the Web has wrought. On one hand, I - as you - had dreamt of a day when "the masses" would use computers transparently to access vast information stores and share things with one another. But it hasn't quite turned out the way that I'd have anticipated or liked."

"Instead, the Web has turned out to be a medium that is clearly skewed toward the broadcasting metaphor of "readers" and "publishers," most always having identifiable information "providers" and "consumers." Due to the fact that the this metaphor was established very early on, and was supported by weak technology (no user identification & authentication, no authoring/editing environment, no document database or any organizational metaphor to speak of, and the name "browser" itself!) people got used to the environment as a static environment. And there it sits."

"Perhaps if the Web metaphors had been more read/write to begin with, it wouldn't have taken off as swiftly and smoothly as it did ..? Maybe a truly effective collaboration network can only exist in closed environments, e.g. a corporation, a special interest group, etc. Maybe people only feel safe identifying themselves in closed groups, lurking anonymously elsewhere."

"We spent days theorizing about how people use information. We wondered about the best ways to give information context. We believed we could help people manage information more effectively with the web. Once we had a beta version it was hard to explain to people. We couldn't come up with an elevator pitch. People didn't get it when they saw it. Pyra was difficult. What's a Pyra? people would ask. We had trouble explaining."

"A lot of times, Blogger was the problem child. Granted, it brought in a lot of new people to Pyra. (we saw it as a gateway app.) When people saw it, it instantly clicked. There was no need to explain it. And once people tried it they were hooked...There was something just as magical about Blogger as there was with stuff. It was connecting us with people. And connecting people with people."

"Christensen doesn't consider the Internet to be an inherently disruptive technology, but an infrastructural technology that can be used in either a disruptive or sustaining way. But it does enable disruptive enterprises, which historically have shared six qualities: they were enabled by infrastructural innovations; they reshaped the prevailing business model to earn money in a new way; they served customers as the portals of their day; they enabled customers to do for themselves what only specialists could do before; they migrated upmarket, as they gradually satisfied the needs once filled by the overserved high end of the market; and branding opportunities shifted from the product to the channel."

"Think of what will be created now people have stopped, thought, and decided that yes there is space to compete. Blogger has been humanised, it can return to being just something people use rather than the roots of the community (and there is a community here). Interoperating personal content management systems. Standards. Growth. Taking over the world. Letting a thousand flowers bloom. "