Eternal September

The Wikipedia page on Eternal September, or the dumbing down of the Internet, is interesting in that it doesn't mention the Web. In summary, AOL allowed it's users access to Usenet starting September 2003 meaning there was a steady stream of neophytes on the 'net rather than just the "traditional" surge each September as a new school year began. I'm not going to dispute the date, but rather the suggestion that it was entirely a Usenet phenomenon. AOL opened the floodgates about the same time as Mosaic became available. Wikipedia puts the availability of Mosaic as April-October 1993, depending on client OS. So two things happened that year: AOL began a steady stream of newbies for the 'net, and the WWW started to gather momentum.

I disagree with those who think Eternal September is over simply because Usenet is now seldom-used. Rather, as society dumbs itself down more and more, Eternal September worsens.

Slash, Backslash, Whatever

Occasionally someone in the media will read a URL and say "backslash" for the path separator, which is obviously wrong. Tonight I was on the phone with a Discover Card operator, and she invited me to visit www.discovercard.com\giveaway. I told her she meant slash, not backslash. She assured me it was a backslash. So now we get to the whatever part of this posting. Discover.com is smart enough to replace backslashes in the path with slashes, so even if the operator gets it backwards, the customer gets to see the marketing materials.

Alta Vista to Shut Down, but Apparently not Babel Fish

PC World has a brief article announcing the end of Alta Vista, the best search engine before Google, and in the author's opinion (and mine) the second best search engine to date. I would let this pass without comment, as one of the last vestiges of DEC going away, but I read a (likely false) report that Yahoo will also be shutting down Babel Fish, which is a fairly good, convenient, translation service. I guess would be partly to blame here: just as I stopped using Alta Vista when Google came along, I've been gravitating toward Google Language Tools rather than Babel Fish lately.

However, the second page a Google news search led me to as I tried to ascertain the fate of Babel Fish says it has been spared for now.