Unicycle articles (but wait there's more...)

leo wrote:
*Even after some Google I still don't know what x.500 exactly is.
This article from the Minnesota Daily contained 1 time the word
unicycle in a comparison:
http://www.mndaily.com/articles/2005/09/15/65130/

IT, unicycle, and Minnesota in one article without the name Gilby
mentioned, that new! *


And for when the link is dead:

September 15, 2005 Rate this Article


University’s X.500 e-mail, a monument to idiocy
If the University were an animal, X.500 would be a lack of opposable
thumbs thwarting our ability to make decent tools.

By John Hoff


mean, naturally, the University insists the inadequate and inefficient
X.500 e-mail system should be “official” student e-mail. The fact that
X.500 lacks bells and whistles is understandable. Resources, after all,
are finite and there’s only so much cyberspace to go around.* However,
X.500 not only lacks bells and whistles, but essential components, kind
of like those ancient, rusting bikes eternally locked to racks,
retaining just one wheel, but not quite up to being a unicycle. * X.500
lacks, incredibly, a SENT file.


ADAM ELRASHIDI, DAILY



I didn’t even know it was possible for e-mail to lack a SENT file until
I was issued my X.500 account. I was like a new army recruit being
tossed an M-16 rifle left over from Vietnam and no flak jacket, and told
to “suck it up and drive on.” How on earth do people get by without
decent, adequate equipment like a SENT file?

Perhaps you remember my last column about my stolen bike. I e-mailed
that column to my editor Karl Noyes saying, hey, here’s my stuff. Here’s
what I can do. It was about that time I discovered the lack of a SENT
file with the crappy X.500 system. Getting a copy back of the original
column for revisions required one in-person conversation, three further
e-mails from Karl and two cell phone conversations. That’s just one
e-mail, needed by one person, on one day. Multiply this satanically
inspired level of inefficiency by every X.500 account held by tens of
thousands of University goers by innumerable e-mails in the accounts and
by all the days of the year. Factor in variables like unforeseen
emergency and the value of red hot inspiration with an original draft.


If the University were an animal, X.500 would be a lack of opposable
thumbs thwarting our ability to make and use decent tools. Fortunately,
grad students at the Humphrey Institute get their own Humphrey e-mail
account, with a SENT file and not just bells and whistles, but also ...
fog horns and trombones. Ah, bliss. Now I can set up X.500 to forward
everything to my “real” e-mail account at The Hump, but plenty of
undergraduate students fail to set up forwarding systems and, instead,
just neglect to check their X.500 e-mail account for weeks or months at
a time.

Meanwhile, important stuff happens like ... reciprocity. Oh, yes,
reciprocity doesn’t just go forward by itself as I found out when I
checked my tuition balance and found (horrors) a negative number. A few
cell phone calls to North Dakota and some documents got faxed and
negative $1,200 became $2,900 of real, spendable money. How kind of
North Dakota. Now I almost feel bad about certain Internet writings
comparing the entire state to a drunk lying face down in the gutter,
pathetically addicted to low wages paid to youth like an alcoholic
hooked on cheap, rot-gut liquor.

In any case, somewhere a little e-mail reminder is going out that you
have to fill out forms before the deadline and make sure the
bureaucratic reply about reciprocity is properly forwarded. You can’t
just let things go because students who are accustomed to the wonder and
glory of Hotmail and Yahoo! would no more like to think about checking
X.500 than checking the contents of a septic system.

This is not to imply that X.500 is so advanced as a septic system. X.500
is more like an outhouse with corn cobs and copies of the Sears and
Roebuck farm catalog for bathroom tissue. Where, I ask, where is a
student government to stand up and state the obvious ... that X.500 is
inadequate and that it’s a sad day when students at far less prestigious
universities (like anything in North Dakota) have far superior e-mail
systems. E-mail zips through the air like the voices of angels, surges
through cables underground like a primal Atlantean power ... what a
waste, what a horrible waste for important messages to disappear into
the ether like the burning library of Alexandria.

No, terrorists didn’t bomb a library in Egypt. Even if you know the
story, these days you have to do a double take and wonder what just
exploded and burned. No, the burning of the Library of Alexandria
happened a long time ago, when civilization was young but thought itself
old beyond measure, a day kind of like today when tiny choices about the
direction of technology changed the destiny of the world forever.

Down with X.500. Students at the University deserve better, for the sake
of the world, for the sake of civilization itself, that the message may
be known and understood in a timely fashion, like the message of a
runner named Marathon who ran so hard he dropped dead, but not before
blurting out the all important piece of information: “Victory is ours!”
On that one piece of information, a city took heart and held its ground,
and the history of Greece was forever changed. All for a single message.
If somebody has to drop dead to get the work of changing X.500
accomplished, so be it, but it’s about time students in one of the most
advanced universities in the history of the world had a system slightly
more evolved than sweaty, half-dead runners delivering scrolls.


John Hoff welcomes comments at .


--
unicycle6869 - LEVEL 10 RIDER-HELL YA!

Jamey (formerly known as tuna6869)

Which is worse, a president who screws an intern, or a president who
screws the country?

*20 Years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you
didn't do than by the things you did-EXPLORE-DREAM-LIVE!
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