 Chris Goh's "On the Net"
Beyond the tragedy in the USA, the economic disasters at home, especially the Ansett crash, have had an enormous impact on the lives of so many Australians and hurt many communities. In the IT sector, things are as bad. Many an IT person can be found in Sydney restaurants serving, instead of maintaining servers. Fortune comes and goes in so many ways.
I'll mention the tragedy in the United States once again, because while watching live when the second plane crashed into the tower, I hit a reality distortion field of sorts. To be distant, yet so connected, left a gap I couldn't describe as events unfolded. Within 24 hours the world knew just as much about what had happened, as anyone living in New York or Washington DC.
For many viewers a world away, the tears were equally sincere as if you had been standing by the Statue of Liberty. To know that your immediate community was sharing some part of that burden from so far away was a reminder that physical distance is no longer an excuse for not understanding.
Hot News
Pioneer has released a sub-$2000 DVD burner allowing home movie buffs to create their own DVDs. One of the advantages with a product from Pioneer compared with the likes of Sony, is that it's less stringent about 'regional locking' which allows you to play and burn CDs in differing code areas - and that's a great bonus.
The future direction of PCs is becoming clearer with the introduction of a more stable socket set for the Pentium IV. If you're buying a new PC now, make sure that it's a Pentium IV with Socket 478 - not the old 423, which is being phased out.
A new 0.13 micron manufacturing process, to be launched later this year, will begin a new phase of architecture redesign.
There's a rumour that Intel will not pitch the Itanium at the desktop market, although AMD may release a 64 Bit chip rivalling its performance next year. So if you do buy a Pentium IV now, you're guaranteed two years of upgrade life, which is good.
Congratulations to Apple. From what I saw in the US, FireWire is becoming the SCSI replacement of choice, instead of Intel's half-hearted attempt at USB (even though they're releasing USB 2.0 now). Even though USB has been popular, FireWire has the high capacity needed when linking with external peripherals, well beyond USB. It's good to see the originator of Firewire technology earn a proper place in the market.
Virus attacks have rocked a number of organisations with sites like Yahoo News being riddled with the new trojan worms. Even News Ltd offices - publishers of The Australian - were affected on the weekend. These new variants are prove more difficult to stop than Love letter and Melissa, because of how they replicate. Previously, macro viruses focused mainly on Microsoft Outlook. The new trojans use new active Internet Explorer browsers to spawn.
Nimda (Admin spelt backwards) has been the most potent of late, multiplying despite attempts to delete it, which affected Outlook and non-Outlook users alike.
While America's human tragedy is still unfolding, business is trying to get back together. Beyond the horrific human cost, it's estimated that $7 billion in IT equipment was lost. Dell had sold some 24,000 servers, laptop and desktop PCs to organisations which vanished when the two towers collapsed. Apparently Dell has had to increase their output to cope. It's a boost that will assist the economic downturn in IT. But the human cost of windfall is far too high.
The top three searches on Lycos this week were 'Terrorist Attack', 'Osama Bin Laden' and 'Nostradamus' - in that order. The reason for the Nostradamus was so popular is due to a hoax spread by a Brock University student in Canada. Among the flurry of attack related emails so many people received, you may have seen it. The truth is that while it started by using a Nostradamus quatrain, the end and its prediction of terrorist attacks and war was simply made up.
It didn't stop the world believing what it wanted to believe.
Hotsites
www.popedeflash.com/
This site will help you to understand why Flash is so good - especially if you're a 3D web developer.
www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/predict.htm
Hopefully this site can dampen some of the Nostradamus interpretations you've received.
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