DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

This is old news for some of you, but I’ll risk boring you for the sake of anyone who hasn’t heard the story, which is an important one — certainly more important than most of the tripe I publish.

Microsoft is a successful company. They have huge amounts of cash, and access to the best and brightest minds on the planet. This makes their failures especially poignant, because they have fewer excuses than most anybody else.

The basic story is that Microsoft published a web page about a former Mac user who switched to Windows 2000. This was an apparent response to Apple’s “Switchers” campaign, which offers the reverse — stories of ex-Windows users who found happiness in the MacOS.

The frightening-but-funny reality is that Microsoft’s “switcher” story is a complete fabrication. For example, the image of the alleged switcher is a stock photo. And the unnamed switcher, when she came out of hiding, turns out to be an employee of the PR firm that Microsoft had hired to create the testimonial.

Daring Fireball’s John Gruber posted an insightful analysis of the story and ensuing cover-up and denials. Part 1: Microsoft’s Answer to Ellen Feiss; part 2: Microsoft Make-Up

(Ellen Feiss, BTW, is one of Apple’s “Switchers.”)

Best quote, from Dave Winer as quoted by Gruber: “You’d think Microsoft could at least find one real person to say they made the switch from Mac to Windows and were happy about it.”

Fascinating reading: Great Moments in Science

The author, Karl Kruszelnicki, has a number of advanced degrees in science and a knack for writing up interesting bits of scientific history.

Griping about analog modem speed seems quaint in the era of DSL and cable modems, except of course for those of us who live out of range of DSL and cable. Nevertheless, this article is fascinating: It’s the Latency, Stupid.

On the matter of line speed vs. capacity — the distinction that is rarely made or understood — Cheshire writes:

Would you say that a Boeing 747 is three times “faster” than a Boeing 737? Of course not. They both cruise at around 500 miles per hour. The difference is that the 747 carries 500 passengers where as the 737 only carries 150. The Boeing 747 is three times bigger than the Boeing 737, not faster.

Now, if you wanted to go from New York to London, the Boeing 747 is not going to get you there three times faster. It will take just as long as the 737.

In fact, if you were really in a hurry to get to London quickly, you’d take Concorde, which cruises around 1350 miles per hour. It only seats 100 passengers though, so it’s actually the smallest of the three. Size and speed are not the same thing.

On the other hand, If you had to transport 1500 people and you only had one aeroplane to do it, the 747 could do it in three trips where the 737 would take ten, so you might say the Boeing 747 can transport large numbers of people three times faster than a Boeing 737, but you would never say that a Boeing 747 is three times faster than a Boeing 737.

If you can read this, I congratulate you! You have braved the rough DNS waters to surf to my server’s new home.

I spent nearly five hours today standing around while a series (and, many times, a parallel) of Pac*Bell and PBI technicians tried to make my new DSL work. The first tech tried a router and 3 modems. All showed synch, but none passed traffic.

The installation tech had to leave (PBI folks are forbidden from working overtime) but they dispatched someone else, apparently missing the message that something in the central office was broken. The second tech confirmed that the first tech was correct in diagnosing a problem “elsewhere,” and then he went and sat in his truck for 90 minutes waiting for P*B to change hardware in the CO. The hardware apparently got changed, but no one thought to call me or him to say so.

Finally, after 6:00 PM, the line came up. And then about 11:00 PM I got my server installed and configured. And then by about 12:30 AM some of the DNS and whois changes began to take effect.

I think this site actually showed less than 1 hour’s downtime, although individual client experiences vary with the performance of their local DNS caches. I saw traffic coming it shortly after booting up the server, though, so that was gratifying. All in all it was the least painful server-and-DNS relocation I’ve ever done.

This is fun: online intelligence testing from the “High IQ society”.