Sarah in San Antonio, Texas, says that when she goes to a restaurant and orders iced tea, the server usually asks, “Sweet or unsweet?” That doesn’t sound right to her. How do you unsweeten tea? Doesn’t the un- imply a...
utility computing n.— «There’s another term for this: Utility computing. It’s the idea that server systems will no longer need to be managed as a set of boxes, but instead as a pool of virtualized resources. These resources can be scaled...
What in the Sam Hill?! It's another newsletter from A Way with Words. Oh, man, when we have fun on the air, we have it in spades, buckets, and buttloads. This past weekend we took a quick look at whether old-fashioned fairy tales are too...
backscatter n.— «Backscatter occurs when a spammer spoofs a legitimate e-mail address to send an unsolicited message to large distribution lists, causing the e-mail server to flood an unsuspecting e-mail address owner’s mailbox with...
We’ve been a little quiet because we didn’t want to start making the fire before the logs were stacked, but the news can now be told: A Way with Words is alive! That’s right: the show will continue, new episodes are already in...
bandwidth rape n.— «Turner also saw his computer server suddenly flooded with Internet data traffic at about 100 times the normal rate—a major concern, because he is billed for all data that flows into and out of the server. In what’s...