CmdrTaco's Journal: You Can't Make This Stuff Up

As you can well imagine, I get a LOT of strange mail. What follows is one that really amused the hell out of me. The name has been removed to protect the innocent. And yes, I asked permission of the writer before sharing this with you.

Subject: What gives with your site?

Hey I was logging back on after getting my email and it doesn't take user name or password.
nickname
password
Moreover it is not even in html. It's all java and "unselectable" text is some unknown text format. I think you have been hacked or something.

But more importantly. This site does not let me select text.. it must be the java which makes pictures but not text.. this is bull shit because HTML is the defacto world standard for textual communication (simply because it can be "copied" through the net by clicking.. why stop selecting and user copying?. What's the point of so many asp documents when the thing is unreadable? It may be an easy way to use microsoft products but you're following them down a hole to incompatibility and confusion. Forget java.. text, images, sound -- text and images, sound.. that's it.. HTML get it. Not java.. Java is only important as an invention because it allows user side computation which is useful in some kind of things like weather prediction (this summer) and non military weather control 2007 (trust me.)

If you are interested in the principles of collaborative "nexi" then please send me my username and password so I can complete development of them. Your org which is laudable in it's vision but unusable (presently) in output. I envision a system where any recipe any though any complaint is easily accessible and retrived, where multi authors contribute to an ever refining site of cogent (and always becoming more cogent) and organized topics (this is still a drawback in your current system. It's a little reader specific rather than browser oriented. There are some key information theoretic principles I would not mind chatting about because I think it will evolve systems like yours more quickly.

We're always evolving else already a dinosaur.

Ok, I'm back. This email cracked me up. The guy is using a broken browser- recently we changed the encoding charset on Slashdot. So his problem is that he can't cut and paste. He brilliantly deduces that the reason for this is apparently that Slashdot is generated all it's content using a Java application. Having demonstrated his understanding of web technology, he rants about my lack therof, and then pimps himself out as an expert in these very technologies. Now to preserve his anonymity, I have not included his email address, but his domain looks to be approximately of the quality of your typical spammer: Poor aesthetics, and a hilariously retarded product. Anyway, I reply to the guy, and tell him in a nutshell that I think he is hilarious. And he replies!:

Subject: Re: What gives with your site?

I appreciate the reply.. I'm really interested in the new thing because it's way more interesting than people know.. If you told people 150 years ago that there would be carriages and they would move under their own power and be maid of metal and stuff we don't have yet (plastic) and they won't leave manure all over the ground everywhere you go (which used to stink to high heaven everywhere you went) then you get some idea of the responses you might get.

Carriages made by blacksmiths?
Mechanical horses?
No manure? What do you put on your crops?

You know there's a lot there..
But with these new collaborative systems (which technically you are doing) come in a lot of forms --basically it's the cooperation revolution... remember when everyone though competition was so great? It is but the goal is not to compete against humans in a 0 sum game. Collaborative systems do just that weather it's a newspaper/encyclopedia galactica like slashdod or a movie review system that extracts mathematical correlates of your innermost taste... It's all "cooperation" it's the secret war to end all war. Trust me.

Anyway if you have database people and a little time and money I can turn any decent internet company into a fortune 500 in 3 years cause there is so much opportunity if you can offer satisfying services based on user participation. Dating services are one great area. But they all lack something I have found --a good practical form of information theory.

Anyway I couldn't log on to slashdot to see what evolutionary hyper growth steps might be possible..

Anyway.. java is what you want to use when people check to the weather site so you can do a little impromptu global weather prediction and control calculations on their computer (the first such system starts this summer like the seti project). But java is no way to print out text which averages one bit of information per text letter.

And who really needs so many nicely drawn menus... That's like decorating pages in the middle ages

Check out my fast simple site below.. And have someone get back to me about possible new expantion$..

So now we're to the real meat of this gentlemans issue. We start with some pseudo smart stuff about parallels between the dawn of the age of the auto, and distributed systems. Pretty obvious start, but at least this guy had the decency to tell me all about it because I really need to think about Manure. He also finally says that he wants to be paid. In fact, he can turn ANY company into a fortune 500 company in 3 years! What if he is hired by 501 companies? Does this make his statement untrue? Of course, since he can't login, he can't provide me with helpful insights about hyper growth steps.

Of course the offer to checkout his site for examples is tempting. And again, his site is hilariously sad. It's essentially a brochure online- "This is my Product" "Here's what it Does" and "Buy my product". It is not a communication Nexi. It is not an example of a well designed site. It is just like any of the hundreds of thousands of other sites doing essentially the same thing for hundreds of thousands of others. And rest assured, it is NOT a fortune 500 site :)

Anyway, I just can't stop giggling about this. The grammatical errors, the typos, the silly metaphors, the misguided understanding of Slashdot, and all of this is wrapped up with a guy who can't figure out how to log in.

I get this sort of email every couple days... but rarely is it this magical.