Category Archives: Internet

Sentenc.es – A Disciplined Way To Deal With Email

The Problem

E-mail takes too long to respond to, resulting in continuous inbox overflow for those who receive a lot of it. The Solution

Treat all email responses like SMS text messages, using a set number of letters per response. Since it’s too hard to count letters, we count sentences instead. five.sentenc.es is a personal policy that all email responses regardless of recipient or subject will be five sentences or less. It’s that simple.

– See also: two.sentenc.es, three.sentenc.es, and four.sentenc.es.

Many hands dept: Internet tipsters are much better at discovering college sports violations than the myopic NCAA.

It was well past midnight in January 2006 when a user named aggiegrant06 dashed off a thread on TexAgs.com that detailed how his girlfriend handed out payroll checks for a car dealer in Norman, Okla. “She didn’t recognize several of the names,” aggiegrant06 wrote. “She thought it was fishy and asked me.”

The boyfriend knew the names in the blink of an instant message: They were football players at Oklahoma. Gotcha

Plus, in same story, we learn that SecDef Gates used to post anonymously on a sports blog,

Before Robert Gates took office as the nation’s secretary of defense in 2006, he was the president at Texas A&M. People knew exactly who he was — or did they? On TexAgs.com, he blended into the fan forum with a secret identity: ranger65, according to The Dallas Morning News. Gates often began his posts with “I’m told” as he went into different issues with Aggies devotees.

Photo credit: Russ Mundy

AMD has a cute page at its 50×15 project, which has counters with estimated counts of the world population and the estimated number of Internet users. The user number grows a lot faster than the population number.

50×15's purpose is to draw attention to the hope that half the planet will be connected by 2015 — a status that AMD says on current trends won't happen until 2030 unless someone ramps things up.

As of this posting, world population is about 6,607,372,000; internet usage about 1,140,247,000; and penetration at 17.25%. [corrected]

Bret Fausett has a great question at Lextext.com,

Someone came up with a new list of the seven man-made wonders of the world. Now, really, what's more wondrous? Some old buildings and statutes...or the Internet? The Internet wasn't even a finalist.