I stumbled on this picture over at engadget.com today.

Yes boys and girls, this is a Commodore 64, this is what my very first computer looked like. It consisted of a keyboard only at first. The os (operating system), if you can really call it that, was hard wired into it. You would then plug it into either a Commodore moniter (pictured here) or a special tv/moniter set that were pretty expensive at the time. If you wanted to get really fancy, you would add on a 5.25″ floppy drive…the big honking thing to the side there, that, I swear, weighed 10 lbs all on it’s own.

This was cutting edge technology in the 1980′s folks. The 64 stood for 64 kilobytes of RAM (Random Access Memory). You read that right…64 kilobytes. Compared to a computer’s minimum now of 256 megabytes, that means a standard computer today is running 262,144 kilobytes. (thank you onlineconversion.com!) Don’t even try to ponder what computers with 1 – 4 gigabytes of RAM have in comparison!

The fun thing about the C64 (as most of us called it), was that anyone could write a program in BASIC (a computer language) with it. You could do simple programs, or rather lengthy complex ones. I think everyone who ever owned a C64 though did this one:

10 PRINT “Hello”
20 Goto 10

You would enter “RUN” and the screen would print out Hello over and over again until you stopped it. Hours of fun I tell ya! Of course, if you didn’t have the behemoth floppy drive to save it to, you lost the program you had written once you turned it off, but oh well. Not a big problem if you were just doing small things like the one I just showed you, but if you wanted to write a big long program, you really needed the floppy drive. (something I did not have for a year or two after I got the C64….can you tell I was bitter?)

The C64 was also the first time I entered the online world. Armed with a mighty 9600 baud modem, I called up CompuServe for the first time in September 1986. (id# 71211,2513 just in case you were wondering! ) I thought I had died and gone to heaven. It was then I started playing with the internet, and have obviouslly, never looked back.

This memory kick-start couldn’t have come at a more intriguing time though. My new computer shipped to me today and I got my laptop back from the repair shop yesterday. I have computers on the brain, so it’s kind of fun to walk down memory lane and remember where most of us got our start. Wikipedia (one of the greatest resources on the web I tell ya!) has a lengthy, and fascinating entry on the C64 that you can read here if you want to know more. One thing that entry mentions that I had forgotten, when the C64 first came out, the price was…$595.

This is some of the biggest news to hit the internet in awhile. It seems Google may be trying to lauch their own online payment system to rival Ebay’s Pay Pal service.

There have been a few to try this before (Western Union’s Bid Pay, Storm Pay and a few others come to mind), but this is the first one I think might actually pose a rather serious threat to the Goliath that is the Ebay/Pay Pal monster.

Without knowing any of the details yet, I know that is a rather bold statement, but let’s face facts, as long as their prices are resonable, have any of the payment system entered our language like Google has? (“Oh yeah, I Googled him yesterday.”) The name recognition alone gives them a leg up.

Also, hopefully, Google will not have some of the insane policies that Pay Pal has. (You can sell pornography on Ebay, but you can’t pay or accept payments for it with Pay Pal???) The big key though will be how easily you can integrate it with existing auctions and online stores. Will they add debit cards like Pay Pal has? (One of my personal favorite features of Pay Pal)

And from the earlier linked news story:

“PayPal accounted for $233.1 million, or 23 percent, of eBay’s revenue during the first quarter.”

With those types of numbers at stake, this could be a very serious battle brewing. I, for one, can’t wait to see how it unfolds.

Some of you may be familiar with the ezboard message board system. For those of you who are not, it is a free service for hosting a message board on your website. It is a network of about 9,000 boards now.

Let me get my personal opinion out of the way…some free things on the net rock (I wub you WordPress), some don’t. Ezboard is a good example of the sucky type.

That being said, the ezboard system was hacked the other day and, it appears, just about every message board got destroyed, along with their backups. Some of the boards are now back up, some had backups dating from May 9th that could be used, but a lot of posts and other items are gone forever.

I am so sorry some folks lost stories they were posting, fun posts they had made or deep conversations they were in. However, I feel NO pity for ezboard. Folks, one of the most basic rules of computing is…YOU DO NOT KEEP YOUR BACKUPS IN THE SAME PLACE AS YOUR ORIGINALS! This applies to your home computers also, but it most assuradly applies to a large network of message boards!

The CEO of ezboard has been trying to cover his behind with a letter he sent out. Let’s laugh together shall we?

1/ The attacker erased all historical post data on all boards and a significant amount of back-up data – the reason we have been able to restore some boards at this time is that we have back up data from the May 9th incremental back-up (we perform back-ups every day, but the attacker deleted many of them). As a result, some board data will be restored, with entries between May 9th and the attack missing. We *may* be able to restore this more recent data from data that we can retrieve from RAM on the servers. The probability of this being successful is not known right now.

If you had non-network connected, or off-site backups, this would not have even been a hiccup you idiot.

7/ New security measures have been put into place to reduce the potential for future attacks,

And what are you doing about backups? Or is it going to be same-ole, same-ole?

What we are doing:

1/ Repairing systems to allow posting on all boards,
2/ Restoring data where possible,
3/ Actions have been taken to close the method the attacker used to gain access to the systems.

And still no mention of a new backup protocal.

Robert Labatt
CEO
ezboard, Inc.

robertlabatt@ezboard.com

Feel free to send him scornful emails.

You know, I do feel bad for the employees who are working to fix this, but honestly folks, the things I am saying about backups are SO basic it is silly. There is a reason for off-site backups. I hate to bring it up, but 9/11 was a perfect example. The financial companies whose offices were destroyed were running again in no time due to….you guessed it….OFF SITE BACKUPS!

If anything good comes out of this, hopefully people will start dumping ezboard (which really is a lackluster system) for other, far superior free message boards out there.

Firefox 1.0.4 is out with an extremely important security patch, make sure to click the button and go and grab it!

Zero-Day Firefox Exploit Sends Mozilla Scrambling – Yahoo! News

For those of us using Firefox, make sure to keep an eye on this story. There should be a patch released very soon to fix it. For now I wouldn’t worry TOO much as it takes several tricks to pull of the malicious code.