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Raw Bytes Computer News KPBX FM 91.1 Radio National Public Radio Network Frank Delaney Producer Broadcast on Thursday Morning 7:35 AM During Morning Edition Support Public Radio ! The Theater Of the Mind |
In computer news this week March 30, 2005 |
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Don’t
be an internet guberif, or things you can do to
avoid being an internet litterbug. I grew up
on the East coast, and we always went for long drives on Sundays. I remember
there were signs painted on the road that said “ Don’t
be a guberif
“, which didn’t make sense, until you saw the sign in the
rear view mirror, and then you’d see that guberif
reversed spelled firebug. The
internet today is slow and getting slower, but there are things you can do to
avoid slowing it down even more. The world wide web - has grown
beyond the wildest expectations of anyone involved in its creation. Email has
become the primary channel of communication for many businesses and
individuals, and the amount of email sent daily is staggering. In emails
we find the biggest internet littering problems. Number one and
totally out of control is spam and junkmail. Microsoft
claims to have an answer for this coming soon; they have their best people
working on it, and this corporate speak has to be interpreted as same old
same old. Probably
number 2 are jokes sent by people – you know who they are because you
probably get them daily. The problem is, usually many of the people who receive
them, send them to their email list, and they start
growing exponentially, literally
going around the world wide web and then coming back to many people who have
already received them before. Then
there are good intentioned people who fall for internet hoaxes of all kinds,
everything from the Funding for NPR being cut off unless you contact everyone
you know, to some schoolgirl working on a project and won’t you help
her by emailing all of your friends, and getting them to email ... well you
know how it goes Then
there are of course totally inane email messages that are rivaled only by typical
cell phone conversations for their vapidity ... I was in a grocery store the other day
in the vegetable section , and I heard this cell phone conversation:”
I’m in the vegetable section now ...... I’m looking at vegetables ..... (as if the
person on the other end couldn’t figure out what they were looking at and had to ask .....) But the
biggest internet clogger is people sending
pictures. We’ve all heard the old saying “A picture is worth a
thousand words.” In terms
of the internet, a picture is about a thousand times bigger than a regular
text email, and there’s a much better way to let people view your
pictures rather then clogging the internet emailing them. Today
when you buy a digital camera the salespeople rave about how many megapixels it is and what great quality it is. These are salespeople who’ve obviously never waited for an
email from someone you know, but you’re not sure what they’re
sending you, and finally – minutes or hours later you get it, and
it’s a picture of one of their gargoyle offspring leering out at you.
Thanks, I need a good scare. Every
internet service I know of gives you personal webspace
in addition to your email account for you to post pictures, music, or
whatever on your personal web area. Then the way you should make these
available to your friends is to send them an email with a link to these
pictures on your webspace in it, describing what
the pictures are , so that if they
want they can click on them and view them, or maybe not. I realize
the internet is creating its own new rules of internet social courtesy. I’ll
talk about this more next week, and one of the biggest Internet social errors
you can make, but everybody seems to make it. For Raw Bytes This is Frank Delaney (C) 2005 MTA Micro
Technology Associates http://www.mtamicro.com/kpbx.html (509)624-7230 |
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