Once upon a time, there was a bright young student taking Electronics II. As part of the course, she was required to find 3 "useful websites" pertaining to an assigned topic. She learned several things during the process:
1. 'Op-amp models' is a vague term. Vague terms are not nice for assignments.
2. The majority of links brought up for such a search term in Google are PDF files. Unfortunately, these do not by the broadest stretches of the imagination qualify as 'websites', although they may be quite useful.
3. Finding the third website takes an equal amount of time to the sum of the squares of the first two times.
In other bright and happy news of the day, there's a clever new little virus making its way around campus. It says something to the effect of "You have been using your letu.edu email account improperly. It will be terminated. Read the attachment for further information." Because, clearly, you can say things in an attachment which you cannot say in an email. These precious little things are even signed by "the letu.edu team". So endearing.
Unfortunately, the happy little attachments are now being eaten up by the big, nasty LU network email scanner. So sad. And they tried so hard to make it in this cruel world, too.
In fact, this whole situation is incredibly applicable to the internet as a whole. One thinks of all the poor, down-trodden spammers who get their innocent little comments blocked by blogs all over the world. And then there are the noble and intelligent script-kiddies who are stopped in their tracks by vicious firewalls, intent on blocking their every means of entry. Last but not least, there are the poor Nigerian nationals needing only a little help, and desperately trying to send emails to everyone on the earth 5 times in order to get it, who are cut off without even a hearing by email spam filters everywhere.
It almost makes me want to break down and cry.
Posted by Ardith at March 28, 2004 11:57 PM | TrackBack