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AOL Facebook
The first computer networks widely used outside of academia were things like CompuServe, Prodigy and then AOL. They were walled gardens: all you could access were the things they provided. With the wider spread of the Internet, they slowly granted increasing access to the Internet. Eventually everybody just used the Internet directly via an Internet…
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SCO
I was thinking recently about my visit to SCO back in 2003. Since then SCO has been through bankruptcy and their various court cases have collapsed several times, although they are still struggling on. Their argument was always very weak. I could see that at the time, although I was also scared that the court…
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California Taxes
My blog used to have just two readers, and I wrote a lot of random stuff. These days I seem to have acquired some 30 readers or so, and I feel a bit of pressure to make these posts actually interesting. That tends to reduce the number of postings, which of course is not a…
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Small E-mail Servers
I’ve run a small e-mail server at airs.com for many years, providing POP and forwarding services for friends and family. In the early days of the net several people found it useful to have a fixed e-mail address which they could forward to their ISP. Later on commercial services appeared, like pobox.com, and these days…
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High Mimetic
Roger Zelazny, in discussing why he liked to write science fiction, referred to Northrop Frye’s theory of modes. In Zelazny’s interpretation, Frye described characters in fiction in four modes: The mythic mode is stories about gods. The high mimetic mode is stories about heroes, people who are better than ordinary humans. The low mimetic mode…