An alternative to .Net

Sure, Microsoft wants to turn the Internet into Net. But there are other proposals to turn the Internet into the world's largest middleware layer.

The goal of Piper is to develop ways to turn 'Net services and applications into objects, which could then be connected into even more powerful applications through something as simple as drawing lines between them on a client-side GUI.

Only the graphical representation of an object resides on a local workstation. Compute-intensive programs and large data sets can reside remotely on high-performance, high-capacity computers.

Joining nodes across the Internet can also be used to form world-wide collaboratives ... and provide an almost limitless collection of objects for the user.

They've already got some software and documentation for you to download and play with.

But does it get soggy in milk?

The Crunch Browser is a version of Internet Explorer 5 with a Cap'n Crunch theme (Windows 95, 98 and NT only).

It's cooler in theory than in practice. When you install it, you get a yellowish toolbar with outlines of little cap'n's hats, and your default home page changes to www.capncrunch.com. And that's it (first spotted by Mr. Barrett).

Ranking the domain registrars

It was inevitable. There are so many domain registrars out there now, somebody was bound to get the idea to do a site to rank them.

DomainNameBuyersGuide.com ranks the registrars by price and by the terms of their registration agreements (there's also an overall ranking that combines the two). Registrars with potential problems get a big flashing Consumer Alert. The site also has an FAQ on selecting a registrar (thanks to Weblogging Considered Harmful for spotting this one).

Bzzzt!

Wolf-Garten, a German garden-equipment maker, has developed a riding mower that comes with wireless Internet access. It also uses a laser beam to cut the grass instead of a blade. Progress marches on. You can see pictures of the beast and read more about it here.

Things you would never try, not you

Face it -- you're busy and serious and sober-minded, so you'd never in a million years try any of the Cube Dweller Survival Projects, such as painting with correction fluid, making a gun out of a spring-loaded pen or creating a cubicle farm. Nope. Nor would you read the rest of The Cubicle Dweller's Survival Guide To PC's, Paperclips and Other Office Distractions.

Digital Divas win

A few months ago, Microsoft set up a Digital Diva site to dispense computer help to the sort of person who can't function properly without some animatron telling him or her what to do. Only problem was there was already a Digital Divas site -- run by IT and Internet types of thee female persuasion. They didn't take kindly to the, um, imposter. Microsoft recently backed down, though, agreeing to stop using the Digital Diva moniker. Read more from the winners.

Chatterbox

In Europe, short text messages sent over cell phones are really popular. A Scandanavian chauffeur recently checked himself into an addiction clinic after he found himself sending more than 200 of these messages a day. The clinic expects more short-message addicts, the Register reports, citing a Danish newspaper.

So these two users walk into a bar...

Round about 4 o'clock, go to Computer Stupidities. No, it's not just another listing of those "dumb user puts coffee cup in CD drive" urban legends. Some of them are true:

My boss received a complaint about me from one of those users that hates all tech support personnel. He said, quote: "I don't know what that idiot did, but my PC was LAN connected yesterday, and now it's not."

I had not touched this person's PC for several months. I went to her desk and discovered she had moved her desk to the other side of the cube. She had disconnected the Cat 5 LAN cable because it was too short to reach the new desk location.

She was not in the area, so I moved the desk back and hooked the PC to the LAN. I left a note saying it would "only work on this side of the cube."

There are scores of them, arranged in handy categories such as Operating Systems, Viruses and even Stupid Tech Support (thanks to CamWorld for spotting this site).

Internet users of the world unite

Now here's a radical idea: Turn the entire Internet into a giant peer-to-peer network free from the control of giant corporations. In We, the Internet, Shannon Jacobs proposes a sort of electronic bazaar:

Everyone would buy their own pieces of the network -- basically a computer with a local radio hub that would receive services in exchange for services provided. Take a simple example of a movie you wanted to watch. Your home machine would broadcast a routing request that would spread through the network to open sufficient virtual channels to a source of the movie, and neighboring machines would relay the packets you had requested -- and in exchange, your machine would provide similar services for them. If you were constantly making more demands on the network than your machine was able to reciprocate, your service requests would start getting rejected, and you'd have to make some choices. You might watch fewer movies, or upgrade your equipment, or even make up the difference in cash, though the goal would be for the network to operate mostly on a service-swapping basis.

Don't click here!

This page

In the area

Remember when whole states had single area codes, when area codes always had a 1 or 0 as the middle digit? Relive those halcyon days of yore with LincMad's 1947 Area Code Map, which shows the original area code assignments.

Chatterbox

In Europe, short text messages sent over cell phones are really popular. A Scandanavian chauffeur recently checked himself into an addiction clinic after he found himself sending more than 200 of these messages a day. The clinic expects more short-message addicts, the Register reports, citing a Danish newspaper.