Last Mile: Trade Show Trauma

11) Death Valley in August

10) Any wireless dead zone (can't page yourself to escape pesky sales reps)

9) A game preserve ("Dang, that lion ate our best prospect!")

8) The bathroom of your local Tex-Mex restaurant during the Green Chile Festival

7) At a series of "flashmobs" in stores and restaurants operated by the Mafia6) Hogwarts Academy (attendees routinely turned into toads)

5) Bill Gates' annual birthday bash (always gets postponed until the following year)

4) The annual Star Trek convention ("It's dead, Jim!")

3) A hot air balloon (altitude makes wireless connections iffy)

2) The big tank at the National Aquarium (those sharks don't give out freebies)1) Area 51 in Roswell, N.M. (hard to tell sales reps from aliens; they both want you for something)

Special thanks to Robert Foster, Peggy Garberick, Ken Graham, Steven Lee, Gregory Mamayek, Jeff Murdoch, Nick Nielsen and Miles O'Neal for using up their frequent flier miles to get us these suggestions. We'd hate to see their expense reports after attending one of these shows.

Everybody's naming and renaming things these days. Stephen King recently auctioned off the rights to name a character in his next book. Sports arenas are now named after the highest corporate bidder. Both celebrities and noncelebs have sold the rights to put company names on their clothing and body parts. Isn't it time to put a new name on the Internet, too?

Over the next two weeks, we'll be accepting your most creative ideas for a new Internet name. Just fill out the form below with your suggestion.

The winning entry will be immortalized in these pages, and we promise to run at least one Internet-related story on the Network Computing Web site using the new name.

C'mon, give it a try - if your entry is really good, maybe they'll name your local stadium after you.

Your Full Name

Email
I doth hereby rechristen the Internet:

OK, so you've automated your software development, your database administartion and your network management. What critical aspect of IT operations is still entirely analog? Right! Pizza delivery. But that's about to change. Wonder Pizza of Italy is now distributing an on-site vending machine that can dispense more than 100 made-to-order pizzas at about six bucks each. The machine comes complete with a built-in heating system that cooks this IT staple in about two minutes. It's only a matter of time before some whiz kid figures out a way to attach it to the network so an empty plate will trigger an SNMP alert-and atumatically put on a fresh pie. Can we get one with anchovies?0