October 17th, 2006 by Patrick Schmid
You get all sorts of posts in the Microsoft community newsgroups: users asking for help or submitting suggestions, users bashing Microsoft, and so on. Occasionally, there is a hilarious post as well, like the following one. So, without further adue, I give you:
Shut the windows and Open the “GATES”
Greets,
It is nice to communicate to ALL this way.I am sharing my brain wave with you which I think,if AGREED BY MICROSOFT BOARD MEMEBERS will be a fitting tribute to the great man who founded MICROSOFT.I wish to humbly state that Mr.BILL GATES in spite of his richness , power and the aura ,has not yet got his full due for the wonderful contribution he has had gifted to the mankind.
From the inception ,MSFT’s software were serving as the “WINDOWS” TO THE WORLD OF COMMUNICATION. Now,MSFT is on the verge of introducing the new MS WINDOWS 2007.
Therefore,this new soft ware should aptly be named or christened as “MS GATES 2007″ as this will open up flood gates of new computing tools.
Therefore,it is time for the WINDOWS to shut and open the “GATES”.
All these years,we have seen the OFFICE only through the “WINDOWS”.Now,we should see and enter this OFFICE through the “GATES”!
History and posterity should always UTTER THIS GREAT MAN’S NAME!
The power of recital of the man’s name by millions of people world wide would catapult MSFT into further enviable position and position Mr.Bill Gates as the FATHER OF KNOWLEDGE SHARING.
I want the internet user community to vote overwhelmingly for my above proposal and idea so that the MICROSOFT DECISION MAKERS will introduce the newer version of MSFT as MS GATES 2007.
Source newsgroup thread
P.S.: I am still laughing
September 25th, 2006 by Patrick Schmid
A friend of mine here at Lehigh has been experimenting with wireless LAN adapters for years now. What interested him especially was trying to connect to access points outside the normal range of a standard wireless adapter, whether built-in or not. A standard wireless adapter is omni-directional, which means it can communicate with a wireless access point that is anywhere within a circle with around 300 feet radius (~90 meters). His experimenting started in his dorm room, where he tried to connect to an access points in a building in line of sight using a wireless adapter and a parabolic dish. The idea being, that a directional wireless adapter would have a significantly larger range than a standard omni-directional ones.
Years after those first experiments, he doesn’t have the parabolic dish anymore. Instead, he has now his own start-up that just brought an iPod-size directional wireless adapter to market, the Wi-Fire.
The Wi-Fire is a USB device and comes with drivers for Windows XP. For Vista RC1, you can download the drivers from Windows Update. Being a directional WLAN adapter, you can connect with it to access point 1,000 feet (~300 meters) or more away while it doesn’t require more power than a built-in omni-directional WLAN adapter. As you can see in the picture, it is rather small. It is sturdy though, as it has easily survived in my full laptop bag.
I personally use it in my favorite restaurant off-campus. With my tablet, I get shaky reception of my university’s WLAN there. With the Wi-Fire, I can eat while checking my emails, posting in the MS newsgroups and reading the news without having to repair my WLAN connection every 5 mins. I’ll be travelling in a few weeks, and I’m already curious to find out which free WLAN of some airport lounges I’ll be able to hop on to 
If you aren’t a mobile user, but have an ISP nearby that provides WLAN (e.g. your university campus), but you are just outside the range of it, then the Wi-Fire might be what you need to get a good connection.
If you are interested to find out more about hField’s Wi-Fire, check it out now.
September 3rd, 2006 by Patrick Schmid
Whenever a smaller website gets slashdotted, it suffers from the slashdot effect. Rather quickly after a smaller site was slashdotted, it simply goes down. Either with no message at all, or with a 503 (Service Unavailable) or a 404 (not found) message.
It is therefore quite amusing to see a 503 message from slashdot itself:
To be fair, the main slashdot site was online. Only the part of the site that handles a user’s profile was down.
August 14th, 2006 by Patrick Schmid
The AOL search query database is now available for searching online:
Someone at Slate also did an analysis of the data and identified seven user profiles.
August 7th, 2006 by Patrick Schmid
Today seems to be a day for scandals.
10 days ago, AOL Research released search queries spanning 3 months from 658,000 randomly selected subscribers. The 2.12 GB of data were released as a 439 MB download on AOL Research’s website. While the data uses anonymous user IDs, it is possible to identify a user based on his or her search queries (for example, a lot of users search for their own name). AOL has since pulled the data and apologized for this privacy scandal. I commend them for making this valuable data available to researchers, but couldn’t they have done this in a less public manner that respects privacy concerns? If you haven’t downloaded a copy of the data yet, you can get it from this mirror.
The second scandal is a photo scandal at Reuters. Apparently a freelance photographer working for Reuters, Adnan Hajj, has either doctored (edited on a computer) or staged pictures from Lebanon. Some of his pictures were featured on the front pages of newspapers worldwide. The scandal started when a blog identified a picture as clearly doctored via Photoshop, which Reuters has pulled since. After more allegations surfaced, Reuters removed all 920 pictures by Adnan Hajj from its database. It seems to be rather obvious that his pictures are no longer credible. For example, two pictures of the same destroyed bridge (according to the caption) showed two completely different bridges. Or, the same building was destroyed in an identical manner twice in two weeks. The Power Line blog covers this particular scandal closely.
The Internet world seems to move a lot faster than mainstream media. The New York Times finally picked up on both scandals:
edited 2006-08-09 to include NYT articles
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