Surfing, according to the laws of physics

By applying the laws of physics, Xerox's famed Palo Alto Research Centre in Silicon Valley believes it has found logic in the seemingly chaotic World Wide Web. And the message for business is that most surfers will only click once on their Web site...PARC has found that 40 per cent of the total number of clicks made on the Web are the first click onto a site...it takes a lot of money to attract attention on the Web - PARC has found 50 per cent of clicks on the Web were generated by 1,554 sites  out of the 200 million-plus (documents-T100 ed.)that exist

UNIX Business Solutions

SCO's Creativeness With /dev/marry

Enhancing a truly mature OS like Unix can be a challenge. But SCO comes through with the marriage device driver...When a system has existed for a long time, it is often difficult to develop exciting innovations. Unix is no exception, since it is one of the most mature operating systems in use today. Thus, it is imperative for Unix software vendors to have top-notch personnel on staff. Well, SCO certainly does. The caliber of its staff is exemplified by one of the new features appearing in SCO... OpenServer 5: /dev/marry, the marriage driver. This month we (ERNEST H. RICE III) discuss how to use /dev/marry and why it is so valuable...The marriage driver is a facility within OpenServer allowing a regular file to be treated as a device. ...

Filter

why antispammers just might save American Society

..the year anti-spammers began lobbying for laws to make spam illegal. It was the year they started demanding ISPs kick spammers off-line. And for their efforts, they got hammered with guerilla attacks by spammers -- including forged mailings that, as I've written before, knocked out antispammers like Jim Youll and the Coalition Against Unsolicited Email. When antispam activists got sick of the harassment, they showed they could dish it out as well as take it, helping to knock über-spammer Stanford Wallace offline. The pyrotechnics are interesting in and of themselves, to be sure. But beneath those battles lurk some age-old social issues. Like the frog in the pan of hot water.

Going global:
The new manifest destiny for IT support centers

Technology holds the promise of opening new doors to foreign markets for big and small businesses alike-and IT support is responsible for keeping those doors open. As support goes "glocal"-locally based, with world-wide range-support centers must learn to balance language, culture, and technology issues..Technology has made it possible for small companies to launch into an international market immediately, whereas historically, companies had to grow provincially before reaching the international marketplace.

In the first wave of computing large systems were relegated to "glass houses," isolated from those who needed access to their power. The second wave of computing saw PCs on users' desks and the first, tentative steps to link users to distant data. The third wave, characterized by network-centric computing (NCC), is taking on tsunami proportions...

Untangling the next Internet

The Next Generation Internet and Internet2 are dissected ...In fact, there are two separate blueprints being developed to do this: the Washington-sponsored Next Generation Internet, as well as the education community's Internet2. ... Much of what has been written about two buzzword initiatives, "Internet2" (I2) and the "Next Generation Internet" (NGI), would lead one to believe that these scenarios are just around the corner...I2 and NGI are separate and distinctly different initiatives...

Shell Objects

Maintaining UNIX systems often involves programming. Unlike programming for
application development, a compiled language usually isn't appropriate to perform routine system tasks. The usual tool for such tasks is a scripting language such as the Korn shell, which can help automate the countless configurations, updates, file distributions, and statistic gathering that's required in system administration. It is rarely the case that a UNIX machine is alone, and as a result, network-wide shell programming definitely has its complications. Every flavor of UNIX varies slightly in its architecture.