Day: November 14, 2000

Are You Ready for Some (Women’s) Football?

It did not make much of a splash, but in mid-October the Women’s Professional Football League (WPFL) began play with 11 teams around the country. Believe it or not the WPFL isn’t the first attempt to kick off a women’s football league — in 1965 a professional women’s league was formed in the Ohio area, and in 1974 the National Women’s Football League formed and managed to hang out until the early 1980s.

Will women’s football ever catch on? Yes and no.

No it will never be even close the men’s version, if only because the market is already saturated with college and professional football. While there are some women who are talented enough to play positions such as kicker for men’s teams, I seriously doubt anyone could put together a women’s professional team that was on par with even a Division I football team.

On the other hand yes. Football diehards just can’t get enough and there are semi-professional football leagues and teams throughout the nation. These are people who are typically college players who weren’t good enough to play professionally but love the game and play it in a very organized setting for the enjoyment and pride they take in it.

I think a women’s semiprofessional league could certainly take off; I know I’d go to watch it just like I turn out for the men’s semiprofessional teams in the area. There’s just something about people putting on pads and hitting each other that is uplifting to the human spirit.

Source:

A League of Their Own. Dan Harris, ABCNews.Com, October 15, 2000.

Underwhelmed By ICANN’s Proposed Domain Names

The BBC reports that ICANN released a list of new top level domain names that it will vote on Thursday. The names under consideration are:

  • .biz
  • .name/.nom/.per
  • .web
  • .health
  • .geo
  • .union
  • .museum
  • .info
  • .air
  • .one
  • .co-op
  • .post
  • .event

What an underwhelming list. Biz, .per/.nom, and .web all make sense, but the others are far too narrow and limited if only a few additional TLDs names are going to be approved. I also can’t understand why they eliminated .kids and .xxx Surely there is far more content that is pornographic or, conversely, aimed at children than there are museum and union sites. Why not provide TLDs specifically for those very large segments of the Internet?

On the other hand, if they approve .web I’ll be one of those sheep trying to register new domain names (though only ones I actually plan to use — squatters are probably going to suck up all the new domain names pretty quickly regardless of what is approved).

A 16x10x40x CD-R/W Drive

PCExtremist has a brief look at a new series of Yamaha CD-R/W drives that promise to fill a standard CD-R in 5 minutes. In addition, Yamaha claims the drive can rip CD audio at 40X meaning converting a CD to MP3 should take about 3 or 4 minutes with this system. Add to that 10x speed for writing to a CD-RW and what’s not to love?

Well the price for one thing — the only place I could find pricing and availability information was Amazon.Com which reports the internal IDE version will be available on November 24, 2000 and retail for $399.95. Ouch. Maybe next Christmas.

Perceptive Commentary from Alicia Montgomery

In an article for Salon, Alicia Montgomery writes about something that had me laughing out loud while watching the news. There was a spokesman for Al Gore saying that the Florida mess should be left to the states, while George W. Bush’s folks were running around saying no, we need federal intervention here.

Expect Bush to start running ads featuring a Florida voter saying that because Gore opposed federal remedies he feel like his vote was taken away from him a second time, while Gore will respond with promises to return power back to the people.