I. O. U. A. Vowel

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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If you add a couple of consonants to one of those vowels you get PUN, which is rather convenient because today is pun day.

You know what’s next.

Enjoy or endure!!

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I really love my fanbase…

without it my fan would fall over.

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When people ask me

what my best quality is,

I always tell them my second best

quality is being mysterious.

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Communicating with Native Americans

… it’s easy when you know How.

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I don’t care what people say,

I’m a terrible psychiatrist.

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My friend was in a go kart race and

kept going even after all his wheels fell off.

It was a tireless effort

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I got so excited in French lessons that

sometimes “oui” would come out

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If you want to know how to see without glasses,

I’ve got some good contacts.

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To all you letters that

want to be before

p in the alphabet,

join the q.

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Walk in fridges.

Pretty cool.

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Everybody has an ego,

mine is just bigger and  better.

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Trees can break wind

(and they’re not the only ones!)

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Four thieves were robbing a music

store when the cops turned up.

The first grabbed all the pop CDs and ran off.

The second grabbed the rock CDs and also ran off.

The third grabbed the Jazz and followed suit.

The fourth was forced to take the rap.

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Browser Wars – A Blast From The Past.

 “Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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Those of you who are old enough may recognize the logo.

Twenty years ago (1994) when I was surfing the internet – and I was – the browser I was using was Netscape Navigator.

In fact it wasn’t only me using it because in those days this flagship product of the Netscape Communications Corp was the dominant web browser. 

Netscape Navigator was based on the Mosaic web browser, and its co-author Marc Andreessen, along with another guy called Jim Clark, founded the Mosaic Communications Corporation and set up shop in Mountain View, California. After discontented noises about the use of the ‘Mosaic’ name from the University of Illinois where Andressen had developed the software, the company changed its name to ‘Netscape Communications’ and their browser’s name to ‘Netscape Navigator’.

It was 1994 and Netscape Navigator was launched. But not without a few hiccups. First it was free for all non commercial users. Then it wasn’t, the free version was restricted to academic and non-profit organizational use. And then it was free again online, with boxed versions available on floppy disks (and later CDs) in stores along with a period of phone support.

It had its teething problems too in the beginning, with a few security issues and so forth but eventually these were smoothed out and they could launch big time, which they did.

In fact the timing couldn’t have been better. The Netscape Navigator browser was ideally positioned to take advantage of the consumer Internet revolution of the mid-to-late 1990s and it soon became the de facto standard, particularly on the Windows platform.

At the time it was technically innovative too, introducing on-the-fly display of web pages, where text and graphics appeared on the screen as the web page downloaded. Earlier web browsers would not display a page until all graphics on it had been loaded over the network connection which often meant that a user had to stare at a blank page for as long as several minutes.

This was very significant at the time. Don’t forget that we were all struggling with modems and dial-up connections in those days. Broadband high speed internet was just a dream.

It had other new features too, many of which have since become industry standards, including cookies, frames, proxy auto-config, and JavaScript.

Netscape Navigator was available for a wide range of operating systems, including Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and OS/2 and it quickly became the market leader with more than 50% usage share. Many people say that it was due in part to the ease of using Netscape Navigator that more people were using the Internet on a regular basis.

Everything was going great for Netscape. And then Microsoft decided to enter the web browser software market. Like Netscape before them, Microsoft licensed the Mosaic source code from Spyglass, Inc. (which in turn licensed code from University of Illinois) and, using this basic code, created Internet Explorer.

At first Microsoft’s browser efforts were way short of the mark (some would say they still are!), and was a much inferior product to Netscape Navigator. However they threw money at the project and by versions 3.0 onwards Internet Explorer became a real competitor to Netscape. As web page content increased the Netscape browser became slower compared to IE, with the result that the latter started to gain significant market share.

From there it was all down hill for Netscape.

In March 1998, Netscape released most of the development code base under an open source license, but the open source community decided to scrap the Netscape Navigator codebase entirely and build a new web browser around the Gecko layout engine which Netscape had been developing but which it had not yet incorporated. Whether deliberate or not I’m not sure, but to add insult to injury the open source community-developed project was named ‘Mozilla’, Netscape Navigator’s original code name. Products like Firefox and Thunderbird have resulted from this.

Then America Online (AOL) bought Netscape. They produced a new version with a new graphic user interface and released it as Netscape 6, but it was not successful in winning back users, who continued to move over to Internet Explorer.

On 28 December 2007, the Netscape developers announced that AOL had canceled development of Netscape Navigator, leaving it unsupported as of 1 March 2008.

And that was that. I think you can still download archived and unsupported versions of the browser for anyone is curious to have a look. But it does not now compare with modern browsers like Google Chrome which in later years did to Internet Explorer what it had done to Netscape Navigator.

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Did You Know? More Fabulous Facts Folks!

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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Not much else needs to be said about today’s post.

Another selection of fabulous facts.

Enjoy.

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At one point in the 1990s,

50% of all CDs produced worldwide were for AOL.

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A British man changed his name to Tim Pppppppppprice

to make it harder for telemarketers to pronounce.

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Google’s founders were willing to sell to Excite

for under $1 million in 1999

—but Excite turned them down.

(Huge big dumb move, where is Excite today!)

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Officials in Portland, Ore., drained 8 million gallons of water

from a reservoir in 2011 because a buzzed 21-year-old peed in it.

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When three-letter airport codes became standard,

airports that had been using two letters simply added an X.

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A California woman once tried to sue the makers of Cap’n Crunch

because Crunch Berries contained “no berries of any kind.”

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Actor Wilford Brimley who has appeared in such films as

The China Syndrome, Cocoon, The Thing and The Firm,

was once Howard Hughes’s bodyguard.

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According to Amazon, the most highlighted Kindle books are

the Bible, the Steve Jobs biography, and The Hunger Games.

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During WWI, German measles were called “liberty measles”

and dachshunds became “liberty hounds.”

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In Spain, Mr. Clean is known as Don Limpio.

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After leaving office, President Lyndon B Johnson

went all hippy and let his hair grow out.

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There was a third Apple founder. Ronald Wayne

he sold his 10% stake for $800 in 1976.

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If you start counting at one and spell out the numbers as you go,

you won’t use the letter “A” until you reach 1,000.

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In Gaddafi’s compound, Libyan rebels found a photo album

filled with pictures of Condoleezza Rice.

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Calvin Klein’s Obsession for Men is used by researchers

to attract animals to cameras in the wilderness.

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Only one McDonald’s in the world has turquoise arches.

Sedona, AZ thought yellow clashed with the natural red rock.

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Marie Curie’s notebooks are still radioactive.

Researchers hoping to view them must sign a disclaimer.

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The 50-star American flag was designed by an Ohio high school student

for a class project. His teacher originally gave him a B–.

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Tsutomu Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima for work

when the first A-bomb hit,

made it home to Nagasaki for the second,

and lived to be 93.

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Barry Manilow did not write his hit “I Write the Songs.”

It was actually written by the former Beach Boy Bruce Johnston.

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Things Your Grand-kids Will Probably Never Know

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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We all happen to be living during a time when there are great advances and changes being made in the way we live our lives. Some of them are to our benefit, other not so much so.

Politically and financially the world is in turmoil. There is an accelerating and inevitable shift of power and influence towards the east, with former great powers like Britain and America declining in their influence and their economic might.

Perhaps that is a natural phenomenon, after all as they say “every dog has its day”, but I happen to believe that a lot of it is due to stupidity and mismanagement allied with a self-defeating philosophy that the west somehow has a duty to police the world and to create nanny states for its citizens where they will neither have to work nor want.

Technologically there have also been many changes and many more to come. During the past twenty years with the advent and growth of the internet everything has changed, from the way we interact socially, to how and where we work, and how we manage our affairs whether that be banking, shopping or whatever.

What a lot of these changes mean is that future generations will have no idea of how our lives used to be. Already many of us who have lived through the changes have forgotten how we used to have to do things. What would it be like trying to explain the ‘old days’ to a generation with absolutely no point of reference to the world we were born into?

To remind you of how it used to be here is a list of some of things we have known and lost, consigned to the rubbish bin of history. Feel free to add your own items to this list of things that your grand-kids will probably never know.

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Libraries as a place to get books rather than a place to use the internet.

Dewey Decimal System

Finding books in a card catalog at the library.

A physical dictionary — either for spelling or definitions.

Reference books such as phone books, encyclopaedias

Finding out information from an encyclopedia.

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Having to manually unlock a car door.

Looking out the window during a long drive.

Using a road atlas to get from A to B.

Getting lost in a world without GPS.

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Being able to add and subtract without a calculator

Long division and multiplication

Trig tables and log tables.

Slide rules

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House phones

Phone books and Yellow Pages.

Rotary-dial telephones.

Pay phones.

Phones with actual bells in them.

Answering machines.

Fax machines.

Not knowing who was calling you on the phone.

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Super-8 movies and cine film of all kinds.

Betamax tapes.

Video tapes and renting movies

Inserting a VHS tape into a VCR to watch a movie or to record something.

Laserdiscs.

8-track cartridges.

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Casette Tapes

Vinyl records. Even today’s DJs are going laptop or CD.

CDs and DVDs

Playing music on an audio tape using a personal stereo.

Taping songs off the radio

A Walkman.

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Rotary tuners that scanned the radio dial and hearing static between stations as you went through the ether.

Shortwave radio.

CB radios.

Rotary dial televisions with no remote control. You know, the ones where the kids were the remote control.

Waiting for the television-network premiere to watch a movie after its run at the theater.

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DOS.

The buzz of a dot-matrix printer

5- and 3-inch floppies, Zip Discs and countless other forms of data storage.

Booting your computer off of a floppy disk.

Tweaking the volume setting on your tape deck to get a computer game to load, and waiting ages for it to actually do it.

Counting in kilobytes.

Joysticks.

Having to delete something to make room on your hard drive.

Waiting several minutes (or even hours!) to download something.

When a ‘geek’ and a ‘nerd’ were one and the same.

NCSA Mosaic.

Netscape

Alta Vista

Being able to get a domain name consisting of real words.

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Cash.

Writing a check.

Doing bank business only when the bank is open.

Shopping only during the day, Monday to Saturday.

Being able to buy something in Walmart that isn’t made in China

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Privacy.

Being able to take a drive or walk down the street without being surveilled on numerous cameras

Not knowing exactly what all of your friends are doing and thinking at every moment.

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Carrying on a correspondence with real letters, especially the handwritten kind.

Neat handwriting.

Spelling

Grammar

The fact that words generally don’t have num8er5 in them.

Typewriters.

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Putting film in your camera

Sending that film away to be processed.

Having physical prints of photographs come back to you.

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Vacuum cleaners with bags in them.

Ashtrays

Roller skates, as opposed to blades.

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