NYPress - Top Drawer-Le Maitre - Taki - Vol. 15, Iss. 13 "What would have happened had Germany won the war [WWI]?" Provocative scenario of the day, via Robot Wisdom

Son Offers Mom's Wisdom on eBay

NYTimes.com Review The Electric Psychologist "Eventually the answer to the question why Licklider isn't better known becomes clearer. He wasn't mediagenic, didn't start a company, didn't invent a gadget or write any software. He was, however, a kind of ideal bureaucrat, whose detailed knowledge and selfless enthusiasm were instrumental in getting America and the world online and out of that cold basement with the punch cards. Waldrop's account of his and many others' world-transforming contributions is compelling." You must read this book if you care about the history of computing and the Internet...

Yahoo! sneaks in yet more spam Seems to be going out of its way to alienate customers

Linux and Office: What a Concept "CrossOver Office is priced at $54.95 per user, with workgroup, site and enterprise license discounts available."

Forbes.com: Out of the Box -- Intel and IBM fight for the post-PC future "Intel Chairman Andrew Grove knows how to make an entrance. Before a crowd of 5,000 at Intel's annual sales meeting in San Francisco in late January, Grove glided up a ramp and onto the stage aboard a Segway, the superhyped, stand-up scooter that some have trumpeted as the greatest invention since the PC. .. The prototype of the vehicle, Grove told the crowd, used a handful of Intel chips. The final version used none. .. Grove's message: Get ready for the electronic future--and get scared that Intel won't play a central role in shaping it. The next chip revolution will take place far beyond the beige computing box under your desk, in a plethora of new and strange devices with an entirely different set of needs. The collision of three tech trends--vanishingly small but powerful chips, the Internet and wireless data communications--is creating a new era of engineering, with great potential to reshuffle business models, spheres of influence and profits."

Virtual Game Weapons Bought With Real Money "Players can advance more quickly by using potent weapons that make their avatars stronger. And for those who lack the time or patience to acquire the goods within the game's confines, Mr. Selden provides an answer in the material universe... Buying up merchandise and virtual currency from those abandoning the game, Mr. Selden resells the goods to eager players, often for a handsome profit. In doing so, he has established an exchange rate between game currency and the dollar, emerging within the GemStone subculture as equal parts Alan Greenspan and J. P. Morgan."

Forbes.com: Analyze This "Despite the software slump, sales are booming in business intelligence, a new tool that promises relief for performance anxiety." ... "The trick to the software is a built-in translator called a semantic layer that Business Objects patented ten years ago and that it claims is widely imitated by rivals. It turns queries such as "sales of TV by region to men under 40" into dozens of lines of database gobbledygook that fetch and combine answers from sales, inventory and customer databases"

Interactive TV Deal Unites Moxi Digital With Digeo "Analysts said that the acquisition of Moxi would position Mr. Allen well for further attempts to move into interactive cable services. But it may also intensify competition between Mr. Allen, who is also chairman of Charter Communications, the nation's fourth-largest cable company, and his former partner, Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft."

Moxi Plans Merger With digeo, TV Firm Owned by Paul Allen "Moxi Digital Inc., a high-profile interactive-television company founded by entrepreneur Steve Perlman, is merging with digeo Inc., a small but well-connected TV company created by investor Paul Allen."

‘Back to the Frontier’ "But we’re only beginning to grasp how weird it is to have wireless Net access all the time. One harbinger: during Tuesday morning’s session with Qwest telecommunications CEO Joe Nacchio, several conference participants were typing their impressions into personal “Web logs,” online diaries available to all on the Internet. One of these “bloggers,” Doc Searls, got an e-mail from a friend across the country, who noted that Nacchio—who at that moment was onstage complaining about how tough life was in telecom—had sold huge amounts of stocks over the past two years. Searls located a page from Yahoo Finance with the particulars and linked it to his log. Another blogger in the room read Searls’s log, and copied the link to his own site, acidly commenting on the inappropriateness of Nacchio’s whining. Though it’s not clear how many in the room were reading the Web logs, apparently there were a lot. In any case, it seemed that the room palpably chilled toward the pugnacious executive. This is a dangerous trend for public speakers everywhere." (via Dave Winer)

ATXTA - Acronyms, Text, Abbreviations, Jargon, Slang, Buzzwords, Emoticons, and Messaging They have "RTFM" and a text messaging guide that'll come in handy one of these days (via Neat New Stuff)

Sun aiming office software at mainstream - Tech News - CNET.com Will be interesting to see how they can keep this going, with its creator now working elsewhere etc.

Thunder Lizard Productions - Top 10 Tips for Usable Flash "... you achieve usability by understanding the people who will be using your site, identifying the goals they're trying to accomplish, and addressing those goals within an engaging design. Design and usability can go hand-in-hand. Creating an interface that focuses solely on design or usability detracts from the overall user experience."

Long Bets "The Long Bets website is designed... ...as an arena for competitive, accountable predictions (Long Bets). ...as a forum for focussed discussion and debate about prediction. ...as an attractive tool for philanthropic giving. ...as a way to foster better long-term thinking." (Thanks Paul)

Knowledge@Wharton: Lawrence Lessig’s Messianic Manifesto: A Doomsday Look at Cyberspace (free registration required) "The hype is deserved: Lawrence Lessig’s The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World offers a devastating analysis of how the freedom and creativity originally built into the Internet are now being built out of it by corporations and lawyers with a vested interest in controlling what people do online and deciding who has access to what." (read the entire review before you buy a copy)

The Register: IE 6.0 is burying Netscape "The tally, extrapolated from the web logs of the 125,000 sites WebSideStory surveys, has Netscape usage at an all-time low of just 7%, down from a fairly steady 12% prior to IE 6.0's launch, with IE making up the bulk of the remaining usage. IE 6.0, released last year, is used by 30% of web surfers, the survey found."

As the Web Matures, Fun Is Hard to Find "Just 11 years after it was born and about 6 years after it became popular, the Web has lost its luster. Many who once raved about surfing from address to address on the Web now lump site-seeing with other online chores, like checking the In box."

O'Reilly Network: Get Your Rotor [Microsoft shared source CLI] Running [Mar. 27, 2002] "So, you'd like to experiment with Rotor. Given that it's made up of approximately 9,700 files and 1.9 million lines of code, it is definitely a little intimidating."

The New Yorker: The Social Life of Paper, by Malcolm Gladwell Back to the drawing board for collaborative authoring tools (other than paper-based ones, that is; via Slashdot)

IE 6 Surges as Netscape Stumbles "Only seven months after its release, Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 has captured 30 percent of the Web browser market. And while IE's gains are impressive, they're coming largely at the expense of one-time rival Netscape, which saw its share drop to under 7 percent, down from 12 percent the year before." Inconsistent with other share numbers I've seen recently.

Q&A: MSN Extends Leadership in Europe "MSN is now the No. 1 consumer site in eight European countries, according to February 2002 reports by Jupiter MMXI and Nielsen//NetRatings. MSN attracts more than 34 million users per month in Europe, and has grown more than 53 percent between February 2001 and February 2002. While competitors such as America Online and Yahoo! report revenue declines in a down online-advertising market, MSN has shown consistent revenue growth."

WSJ.com - Personal Technology: Developing Wireless Technology Comes With Its Own Language Useful overview from Walt Mossberg

The evolution of Web services Systinet world view that greatly annoyed Dave Winer

Fawcette.com - Java Technology Achievement Awards Winners More reader's choice awards

Mobile Devices (MSFT interactive demo) Nice Flash app...

ZDNet: Tech Update: Security / MS vs. open source: Security's the same "The fact is, both sides have their share of problems--but neither side has the edge when it comes to fixing security holes. You're just as likely to encounter a security problem with open source code as you are with Microsoft Windows, and the fix is just as likely to appear quickly and be done properly."

Sony shows off new handhelds - Tech News - CNET.com $.07 says this is the last major Palm OS device Sony introduces; I suspect their experience with Ericsson and others on Symbian, for example, is going to influence future decisions

Boxes and Arrows: Taking the "you" out of user: My experience using personas Insights from one of the co-creators of Blogger

Slate: Today's Papers: A Moot Beirut? By Eriq Gardner ... "The LAT fronts a fascinating new look into the highly publicized Dec. 10th American bombing mistake that almost killed Hamid Karzai, named as prime minister the following day. The "friendly fire" is now believed to have taken out three Green Berets and 25 Afghan allies. According to the story, American military and members of the Northern Alliance were leading an offensive mission against the Taliban. A commander called for airstrikes to wipe out the enemy. An Air Force serviceman calculated the position where the strikes needed to be made, but then the battery to his global positioning system unit needed to be changed. Once that situation was remedied, the serviceman's own coordinates came up on the unit, and this was the data that was relayed."

The Register: Suffer not the little children - McNealy "Scott McNealy was a worried man yesterday. Not over Sun Microsystems Inc's financial performance. Instead, Sun's chairman and chief executive is postponing retirement to battle Microsoft Corp and protect his children's future"... "The normally biting McNealy delivered a curiously under-par JavaOne keynote speech that urged developers to evangelize Java, and prevent Microsoft's take-over of web services. McNealy urged developers to test applications against all browsers, for example, such as Opera and NetScape - not just Internet Explorer (IE). Failure to do so, he warned, created dependency on Microsoft."

The Register: Early Xbox sales low in Europe - report Hmm...

Study Shows Web Surfers Snapping Up Digital Cameras "Digital cameras could belong to up to 60 percent of U.S. households connected to the Internet by the end of this year, compared with a third of such households last year, a market study released on Tuesday forecast."

TheServerSide.com - TheServerSide At JavaOne "But what's really interesting about this years JavaOne isn't just who's here, but more notabily, who's missing. You won't find talks on JBoss and Jakarta projects at JavaOne, as these projects don't directly bring revenue to Sun through J2EE licensing and are percieved as a threat to high-end, high-dollar strategic positioning of Sun's most lucrative partners. If you're looking to network with JBoss or Jakarta team members, you instead go down the street to JBoss One and Jakarta One, which are being held concurrently with JavaOne to protest Sun's exclusion of these groups from the events."

WSJ.com - Technology: Microsoft Offers Some Source Code To Gain Ground in Student Circles Interesting counter-FUD measures

WSJ.com - Technology: Sun Microsystems Offers Concession To Open-Source Developers on Java "During his address, Mr. McNealy appealed to Java developers to act as "disciples" promoting the technology against Microsoft's .Net software for Web services. "Mankind needs your help to go out and evangelize this platform," he said... He nevertheless claimed Java was winning. "Java is now a more prevalent language on U.S. campuses than even English," he said."

PCWorld.com - Talk on Your Cell Phone Without Saying a Word This will come in handy when everyone around you is also talking on a cell phone...

Java's top guns Interesting results; makes me wonder about sample size subjectivity etc.

Early Adopters Like Visual Studio .Net | Computerworld News & Features Story Really annoying format, but some good summaries if you follow the links

Responding to James Gosling Lots of Gosling flaming today (via Dave Winer)

When Web Services Go Bad Interesting insights from real-world experience, e.g., "Do not attempt to take an existing web site, so leaky that every server had to be rebooted every four hours, delivering HA through many servers, with no test suite and no automated install process, and try and turn it into a profitable web service." Via Sam Ruby's weblog

Code-crunching the Booch way Mixed bag article -- overall message is right, however: "The great thing about both .NET and J2EE is, for the enterprise, they raise the level of abstraction, providing services that in the past people had to create for themselves." I'm sure the folks in Redmond would have something to say about this assertion: "Even Microsoft, which is pushing ahead with .NET's Web services, uses Sun Microsystems' J2EE in parts of its enterprise, he says"; maybe he's referring to the competitive dissection lab... (via Dave Farber)

The Register: Novell spoofs XP flying people - video This is so pitiful it's sad

The Register: Gosling on C#, why X Windows sucks, and asparagus Someone has clearly been practicing his one-liners...

Wooing away Java developers "J#.Net is an implementation of the Java language. It's not an implementation of the Java platform. Our platform is the .Net platform. To be clear, J#.Net is not intended to write software to target anything but .Net. It's designed to run on Windows, and we've been clear about that. Now, as far as the benefits, it goes back to the benefit of the platform itself."

Fawcette.com - James Gosling on J2EE & .NET "In some sense, you could say that Sun has been doing Web services for 20 years," Gosling added. "There's already a huge stack of XML technology available in the Java world. And the J2EE market is exceptional, with a lot of different pieces and platforms to choose from. Our standard line is: .NET is a product, [but] J2EE is a market."

Guardian Unlimited Observer | Business | Limit copying and we may end up copying the USSR Interesting perspective (via Dave Farber); "But the outrageousness of the studios' position does not seem to have outraged US legislators - which may have something to do with the fact that Disney alone gave them $6.3 million in campaign contributions in a single year. ... There is, however, one sobering statistic which may eventually cause even Congress to balk at the studios' arrogance. US domestic spending on computing technology is running at $600 billion a year, while Hollywood generates a measly $35bn. ... To concede the demand for copy protection would be tantamount to compelling a huge, dynamic industry to march to the soporific beat of a technophobic industry desperate to preserve its obsolete business models."

Mercury News | 03/23/2002 | Thumbs are the new fingers for GameBoy youth (via Dave Farber)

The Seattle Times: Business & Technology: Shut out: Novell used to rule the networks. Then came the new networks "They could be a footnote in history five years from now," Kusnetzky says. "Or they could have found a new niche as the supplier of the glue that ties it all together.
"And I'm not sure which way it is going to go."

Sun Aims to Extend Its Lead "At its annual JavaOne conference, which opens here on Monday, Sun will roll out a new set of Web services standards intended as an alternative to Microsoft's .Net. Sun will also announce a wide range of alliances with a global lineup of wireless carriers and handset makers."

Boston Globe Online / Business / Pyra Labs at the forefront of Weblogging phenomenon "As of last week, 473,000 people had used Blogger to create their own Weblogs. Williams figures a quarter of them actually update their blogs regularly. Basic blogging is available for free, complete with your choice of attractive visual layouts. If you already own space on a Web server, you can have Blogger publish your stuff there. Or you can use the free Blogspot service to publish your thoughts."

Taiwan Maker of Notebook PC's Thrives Quietly "Buy a notebook PC from Dell, Gateway, Compaq Computer (news/quote), or Hewlett-Packard (news/quote), and the odds are that some or all of it was assembled by Quanta, which is now using its strength in laptops to move into the desktop market, too, by putting together Apple's stylish new iMac... The company already produces PC's for seven of the top 10 notebook companies. It manufactures close to half the notebooks sold by Dell, making it by far Dell's largest supplier. It will turn out more than five million notebooks this year, 30 percent of all those made in Taiwan. Taiwan, in turn, makes 55 percent of the world's notebook computers."

Telecom, Tangled in Its Own Web "Yet while all eyes remain on Enron, a tragedy of identical plot but with far more damaging implications has been playing out on another stage. Unlike Enron's saga, this drama is not about a single, rogue company operating to enrich its executives. This tale is about an entire industry — telecommunications — that rose to a value of $2 trillion based on dubious promises by Wall Street and company executives of an explosive growth in demand for telecommunications services. When that demand failed to materialize, the companies were left with mountains of debt and little revenue."

Corporation Reaches Goal, Shuts Down Good humor from The Onion: "We did it," founder and CEO Michael Dell said. "Back when I started this company, I vowed that I would not rest until we revolutionized the way computers are sold. Well, at long last, that day is here. Bye."

Google takes on supercomputing - Tech News - CNET.com "Google has begun an experiment that could turn its modest toolbar software into a supercomputer to tackle scientific problems such as untangling genetic codes." (via Tomalak)

The Register: Nokia US communicator set for summer release "The killer feature is probably multitasking. On the Symbian-based 9210 we got used to taking conference calls through the speakerphone, while flipping between a PowerPoint slide and taking notes in the Word program, all the while recording the call for later use. SMS messages would appear, and it never hiccuped." Also see Smartphone roadmaps for 2002.

Palm Shares Rise After Rosier Forecast It's all relative -- maybe it's time to invest in Handspring...

Symbian: Sony Ericsson P800, a Symbian OS phone that will change the way people communicate Talked to an IDC analyst this week who said Sony Ericsson is going to give Nokia some very strong competition

Finding Pay Dirt in Scannable Driver's Licenses Disconcerting (via Dave Farber)

The Register: Hello WinXP SE: Microsoft reshuffles roadmaps, again "XP SE will be principally a consolidation release. Candidates for inclusion are the essential .NET client-side plumbing: the common language runtime (CLR), Internet Explorer 7.0 and DirectX 9.0, and a mature Bluetooth stack. Microsoft has blown hot and cold on Bluetooth - mostly cold, actually - but with chipsets at the $5 mark, it's going to be ubiquitious in PDAs and phones by 2003."

The Register: XBox 2 'designed with AMD processor' Also see The Last Man Standing -- interview with co-founding/outgoing AMD CEO for fascinating historical perspectives

WSJ.com - Yahoo to Charge for Mail Forwards
To Raise Revenue During Ad Slump "The Sunnyvale, Calif., company said it would stop providing free access to users who check their Yahoo e-mail from outside services such as Eudora and Microsoft Corp.'s Outlook. Starting April 24, users will have to pay $29.99 a year for the mail-forwarding service, though users that sign up for it prior to that date can pay a discounted price of $19.99... The announcement, which was sent out in an e-mail to Yahoo users, marks the first time the company has transformed a free communications feature to a paid service. Yahoo has added several other enhanced services that it charges users for, such as extra mailbox storage space or real-time stock quotes. It has also converted some once-free services that aren't primarily associated with communications, such as auction listing fees."

WSJ.com - Technology: AOL's Latest Internal Woe: 'You've Got Mail' -- 'Oops, No You Don't' "In a humbling reversal, AOL Time Warner Inc. is retreating from a top-level directive that required the divisions of the old Time Warner to convert to an e-mail system based on AOL software and run by America Online's giant public server computers in Virginia... The drive to get all the company's 82,000 employees to use AOL e-mail was an attempt to give symbolic resonance to the marriage of AOL and Time Warner, the largest corporate merger in U.S. history and perhaps the most-scrutinized litmus test for the marriage of the old and new economies. Instead, management got months of complaints from both senior and junior executives in the divisions involved, who said the e-mail system, initially designed for consumers, wasn't appropriate for business use. Among the problems cited: The e-mail software frequently crashed, staffers weren't able to send messages with large attachments, they were often kicked offline without warning, and if they tried to send messages to large groups of users they were labeled as spammers and locked out of the system. Sometimes, e-mails were just plain lost in the AOL etherworld and never found. And if there was an out-of-office reply function, most people couldn't find it... The e-mail problems have led many staffers to resume pre-Internet habits. Employees say they are faxing and using Federal Express more than before. They also are picking up the phone or wandering down the corridors in search of human contact. "If all goes well, we'll never have to use e-mail and we'll have to start talking to each other again," says one magazine writer." Oops.

The various types of e-mail software used by employees aren't the same as those used by America Online subscribers at home. Instead, the divisions customized AOL products, such as those from its Netscape unit."

JAVAONE: Gosling hits 'Jackpot' with futuristic tools "Simply put, when you have very large pieces of software, most of the tools look at the individual lines of code as text," Gosling said. "It is often extremely powerful to look not at individual pieces of code but at a system as a whole." Um, ever looked into UML?...

Boxes and Arrows: Got usability? Talking with Jakob Nielsen "Right now we have about 30 million websites, and we will have up to 100 million in three to five years. That’s a large number of design projects. How many usability people are there in the world who are in any way qualified? At the most, maybe 10,000 or so." (via Tomalak)

In Microsoft Case, RealNetworks Says Competition Is Unfair "...But Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly struck from the record the portions of Mr. Richards's testimony in which he said pressure from Microsoft had led International Business Machines (news/quote) and Compaq Computer (news/quote) to give RealNetworks less favorable contract terms. She called Mr. Richards's comments "classic hearsay."

ONJava.com: JBoss: Sun Needs Us [Mar. 20, 2002] Fascinating case study

Feb/Mar 2002 Bulletin: ASIST 2001 Keynote: Brewster Kahle "Kahle's Alexa (a name he took to honor the great library at Alexandria) Web collection now comprises more than 100 terabytes. There are 16 million sites, and more than 10 billion pages have been added over the past five years. Alexa has more text than the Library of Congress and the digital storage costs only $300,000." (via Tomalak)

Silicon Valley Reboots "So welcome to Revenge of the Nerds, The Sequel."

WSJ.com - AOL's Netscape Buy An Issue Again In Microsoft Trial "AOL-Time Warner Inc.'s (AOL) 1998 purchase of Netscape Communications Inc. again became an issue in the Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) antitrust trial Wednesday... Netscape's complaint to the Justice Department in 1996 about Microsoft's efforts to crush its seminal Navigator Internet browser sparked the case, which began about a month before Netscape was swallowed by AOL. Microsoft said AOL's purchase proved Netscape still had value - an argument that didn't prove key in findings reached in that stage of the case by U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson... But Microsoft attorney John Warden cited a Monday Wall Street Journal article stating that AOL is now considering using the Netscape browser instead of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Cross-examining former Netscape President James Barksdale , Warden asked whether that is not proof that Microsoft didn't destroy Netscape... AOL's 34 million subscribers "account for one-third of the use of Internet Explorer," Warden said. "It's been an open question for some time that AOL would discontinue the use of Internet Explorer and use the technology that it owns," Warden said."

More fun: "Judge Kollar-Kotelly questioned Sullivan's use of the states' 100 hour allotment of time to ask questions of Barksdale that seemingly repeated some of those facts as well as his written testimony." "Time is ticking away," she said. But she added: "if you want to go through repetitive information, go ahead."

WSJ.com - Digits: Search the Web in Klingon,
Should the Urge Strike You "Beyond Global: The World Wide Web is now accessible to surfers from out of this world. Google Inc.'s Google.com offers its Internet search interface and help pages in a half dozen alien, nonexistent and dead tongues such as Klingon, Elmer Fudd, Bork Bork Bork, Pig Latin, and H4x0r -- a hacker tongue. They receive some 150,000 queries on the zany language pages daily."

WSJ.com - Personal Technology: Palm's Lightweight, Color m130 Has Quality Features, Nice Price Mossberg throws Palm a bone

JavaOne: Sun, IBM plan Java portal standard Good case study in co-opetition

Mercury News | 03/13/2002 | Matt Marshall: German dropout inspired by valley Marco Boerries background

The Register: Bill's vision for the future of the PC, c1980 - er, Xenix Software archeology

Handspring Treo 180 Review: Part 3 Good roundup of reviews

Handspring Treo 180 Review, Part 2 "Bottom line about the Internet? It feels like using the Internet on a laptop when traveling. I assume the GPRS upgrade will remove the "wait 30 seconds" part and make it even better."

O'Reilly Network: Microsoft's Research Director Taps Top Tech Trends

Hewlett-Packard Declares Victory on Merger Now the hard part begins...

Ex-Chief of Netscape Criticizes Microsoft's Penalty Proposal "I remind you only 20 years ago the most sophisticated application you could get on a PC were little games," Mr. Barksdale replied. "They all start small. They can grow. Let them have a chance." Candidate for outlier-of-the-week quote

First Native XML Web Services Tool For the Java Language Nears Completion Audacious positioning

WSJ.com: Charter Backs Away From Plans To Use Microsoft's TV Software "Charter had announced a relationship with Microsoft in November, stating that it expected to use the software company's technology in as many as a million homes over the next several years. But it didn't designate a software supplier when it announced plans for the high-profile set-top device last month. The box is being developed with digeo Inc., a television company founded by Paul G. Allen, the Microsoft co-founder who is also Charter's chairman." Includes handy chart showing ~$10B of MSFT investment in cable companies.

News: Symbian to get Visual Basic support At least somebody is planning to support pre-.NET VB...

Brewing Conflict Gosling: "The Java Virtual Machine supports many different languages. Most of the commercial Ada compilers target JVM, and many defense projects use that. We support all kinds of languages—but we don't say that we're willing to support all languages. That [selective support] has to do with issues of what you can prove, from a security point of view. There are good reasons not to try to support C and C++. Supporting them drives you to support unrestricted pointer operations. The security story goes out the window; the reliability story is trashed as well, and that backs you into the security problem from another direction."... "The other complaint is that the Java Community Process is slow. I've evolved a standard reply: Democracies do work more slowly than dictatorships, but over the centuries, societies have decided that the price is well paid."

Sun, AOL Time Warner end iPlanet pact "iPlanet is now a division of Sun and a core component of our Sun Open Net Environment (Sun ONE) offering," McNealy wrote in the e-mail. "We have intellectual property rights for all of the products. And the product-engineering and support organizations are now fully staffed by Sun employees."

BBC News | SCI/TECH | Hacking with a Pringles tube "Security company i-sec has demonstrated that a directional antenna made with a Pringles can significantly improves the chances of finding the wireless computer networks being used in London's financial district." (Thanks, Barry)

SXSW 2002 - Japan Phone Story: Japanese Mobile Phone Culture via Camworld

Yahoo! News - GM Hopes Web Services Turn The Key To Data Access "The automaker has launched far-reaching Web-services tests that, by year's end, should result in workers using Web-services tags to freely access GM's vast stores of data via the company's 130,000-seat Lotus Notes installation. But that's just the beginning."..

News: PlayStation 2 gets kicked out of CeBit Playing for keeps...

Microsoft Campus a Terrorism Target Sign of the times...

States Seeking Stiffer Penalty for Microsoft "Netscape is an old story; it's done and finished," said Andrew Gavil, a professor at Howard University Law School. "It's media players and other software that are threatening the operating system now. The states are going to have to persuade the judge that they are talking about current threats without actually getting into different conduct."

WSJ.com: Handspring and Sprint Reach Deal To Produce New Version of TREO "Can your Palm do this?..."

WSJ.com: Web Sites Face Dilemma After Terror, War Boosted Popularity of Video Clips > 50% of US Internet audience using streaming media at work, according to chart in this article (from Nielsen/NetRatings)

Microsoft more mobile "They help solidify Microsoft's impending dominance of portable digital assistants," said Isaac Ro, an analyst with the Aberdeen Group in Boston. "Palm is still far and away more popular, but Pocket PC-powered devices are going to win the battle by 2005, or even by 2003."

Wireless News: Microsoft Enters Next-Gen Mobile Arena "The Thera (Greek for "opening" or "gateway") is about the size of a 3x5 file card and weighs about seven ounces. It enables wireless phone calls, messaging, and Internet and e-mail access. With mobile data transmission speeds of 40 kbps (kilobits per second) to 60 kbps, the device also offers multimedia and text data services, Microsoft said."

Read Darwin -3G or Not 3G? That Is the Question. "You will get all the business benefits you need by embracing 2.5G," says Wallin [Leif-Olof Wallin, an analyst at Meta Group in Gothenburg, Sweden]. "It's always on, it's dependable, and it gives you just about the same bandwidth that you can get from 3G."

allNetDevices: - Microsoft Notches Big Wireless Wins Good summary

Radio Community Server: Home Announcing Lotus Notes 1.0, without the mail and app infrastructure (albeit with a cleaner user interface -- but not a cleaner designer/developer model)

Kausfiles Has Seen Bill Clinton's Future! - Campaign-finance reform could turn him into a kingmaker. By Mickey Kaus Could happen...

Novell looks to Web services for resuscitation Good reality check case study: Novell has been losing momentum for more than a decade, but there's still a large installed base...

The Seattle Times: Business & Technology: Wireless phones come home: Ads push for everywhere use "The average monthly bill has declined 38.9 percent in the past 10 years to about $45 per subscriber. At the same time, wireless carriers on average spend upward of $300 to attract each new customer." What's wrong with this picture?...

The Register: Sorenson advances on video codec market "When Macromedia Inc started shipping Flash Player 6 on Friday, it came with 70k of decompression code, custom-built by Sorenson for the company. Developers will be able to use Flash MX, also released Friday, to build streaming video directly into their Flash interfaces."

Microsoft and VoiceStream to Deliver Wireless Data to Customers' Pockets "VoiceStream is a member of T-Mobile International, the wireless subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom (NYSE "DT"). Today's announcement builds on plans released by Deutsche Telekom and Microsoft last week to deliver XML Web services to customers throughout Europe."

WSJ.com - Eyes on the Road "Should your next car have a black box that can capture information about how fast you were going or how hard you hit the brakes in the seconds before an accident?" I've read about this topic in Wired, The Boston Globe, and now wsj.com, all in the last 36 hours; looks like somebody is doing a subtle PR campaign...

AOL Starts Testing Netscape Browser Amid Chilly Microsoft Relationship "... if America Online does switch all of its 34 million users to Netscape's software, Netscape's market share would likely jump to 35% to 40% of the market, according to Giga Information Group. "Microsoft and Netscape would look almost equal again, it would be that close," said Rob Enderle, an analyst at Giga. He added that severing all ties with Microsoft is "one of [America Online's] goals in life."" Am I the only one wondering if this is really a meaningful issue anymore? Have you ever used the AOL client for Web browsing? You certainly didn't have any brand awareness of IE, if so; makes me wonder if MSFT really has anything to lose if AOL makes the switch. Maybe MSFT is secretly paying AOL TW to do this in order to alleviate govt. pressure on MSFT... Interesting chart in the article -- claims Netscape has larger consumer share than I imagined, and that IE share with consumers peaked in 1999.

CTIA Conference to Showcase Wireless-Enabled Hand-Helds "...the Redmond, Wash., software behemoth, which makes software for the Pocket PC, has struck a deal with VoiceStream to be the first U.S. carrier to offer a combined voice-data Pocket PC in the second quarter of 2002. In addition, Microsoft has signed up with Verizon Wireless to offer a Pocket PC phone-and-data device made by Audiovox Corp., also later in the second quarter. Lastly, Microsoft and Cingular Wireless are teaming up to bring a smartphone to the U.S. later this year."

ZDNet: Story: The HP-Compaq deal: Heads you lose, tails you lose "Do these two really think they are smarter than all the other merger maniacs whose once-in-a-lifetime deals went straight to hell?"

Economist.com: Sun stroke "Sun Microsystems—the largest maker of servers for computer networks—is about to turn its mantra, “The Network is the Computer”, inside out. Will the new vision relegate centralised servers to the scrap heap?"

Economist.com: Mach 1 at Microsoft Good update on Microsoft Research

Economist.com | Mobile telecoms: The tortoise and the hare Part of another outstanding technology update section in the latest issue of The Economist. "The late arrival of 3G means that Europe's wireless lead has evaporated."

Point, Shoot and Translate Into English Very cool Pocket PC app from IBM Research

Profits Fall 13% at Oracle, and It Blames the Economy What bad luck -- the fickle economy picks on Oracle but not most of its direct competitors...

'Dot.Con': One Is Born Every Minute "Unfortunately, Cassidy ends up closing the book in much the same way he opens it -- with a forced march through yesterday's business pages. He reminds us about forgettable moments like the collapse of Pets.com and all the various days on which the market rallied and dipped and died. Like a lot of dot-coms, Cassidy started out with a potentially winning concept. But he made a critical error when he attempted to make his book a ''category killer,'' an epic tale that would render all competing dot-com tales obsolete. There are just too many elements of the sprawling history about which he has little new or profitable to add."

Where Music Will Be Coming From I trust all of these journalists understand we'll soon be reading about where the articles/reports/books/etc. will be coming from

He Said. She Said. It Just Gets Uglier [HP saga]. "Among his institutional investor peers, Mr. Pigott senses what he terms the "Nascar effect" — a sporting curiosity, now whetted, to find out if Ms. Fiorina will succeed with the combined company or crash and burn. "It's an attitude of `All right, let's see what she can do,' " Mr. Pigott said."

O'Reilly Network: The MX Factor [March 16, 2002] Lots of good debate building

Handspring Treo 180 Thoughtful review

New Mira Devices Announced, Beta to Begin "A PC on every desk and in every home"... and now an application server in every home to drive "Mira" and other devices.

Andersen Charged With Obstruction in Enron Inquiry I can't understand how anyone is surprised about the conflict of interest dimensions in this; it's obviously going to lead to splits between consulting and auditing throughout the entire industry. They're lucky Andersen Consulting (acrimoniously) morphed into Accenture before this debacle...

New Windows could solve age-old puzzle - Tech News - CNET.com DBMS rules

The Seattle Times: Business & Technology: Microsoft, Deutsche Telekom team up for mobile services to business customers Circuventing the handset players once again

The Register: StarOffice creator pitches for devices, mobile companies "CrossPoint is intended as an infrastructure sold to service providers, who will in turn use it to offer subscription services to their users. These service will be available on all of the devices the user has, and they'll be kept in sync, and up to date."

Users irked by Domino moves Yukon envy? (thanks BobB)

O'Reilly Network: Macromedia reinvents the Web [March 12, 2002] First negative slant I've come across

Ex-Sun exec to launch new company - Tech News - CNET.com Definitely one to watch

The Seattle Times: Business & Technology: AOL test ignites talk of dropping Explorer "Internet Explorer is used by 91 percent of people browsing the Web, compared with 8 percent of Internet users who rely on Netscape's competing browser, Johnston said. AOL, which makes up at least 15 percent of the Internet's user base, could double Netscape's market share if all AOL users upgraded, Johnson said."

The Register: World's most interesting computer in jeopardy

Microsoft Rocks the Business Intelligence Industry "While companies such as Oracle Corp. and IBM Corp. lost momentum, Microsoft's percentage of the $3.3 billion industry almost doubled in 2001, growing from 11.7 percent to 21.3 percent. This was the fastest growth by any major OLAP vendor since publication of the first report in 1995."

News: Worldwide cell phone sales decline "Overall sales to consumers declined by 3.2 percent to 399.6 million mobile phones in the full year, a marked difference from the 60 percent average growth rate between 1996 and 2000." Still amazing numbers...

BEWARE! It's a WORM! Re: IP: The next step in malicious spam I've received 5 copies so far...

Go to: The Story of the Math Majors, Bridge Players, Engineers, Chess Wizards, Scientists and Iconoclasts who were the Hero Programmers of the Software Revolution A couple noteworthy quotes from the book, which I found useful despite a surprising number of typos:

"Whenever you hear someone say it has to be 'easy to learn and natural to use,' put up a little flag and go question it. ... Engelbart declared, "What's natural is what we've grown to accept"... To Engelbart, the desire to make things easy to learn and use was often the path to second-best solutions. He pointed to the tricycle, so much easier to learn than a bicycle; yet once trained, the bicycle rider had so much more speed and range." (p. 147)

"Java is a language where the rules are the rules," Gosling said. "Once you adapt, it is really an incredibly liberating thing." He compares the criticism of Java with the outcry heard from early fighter pilots, irritated when aircraft manufacturers sealed off cockpits. In the old days of propeller-powered planes, pilots stuck their heads out to navigate and sniff the air, sending the winds and the weather. "But when you are in a plane that is flying at Mach 3, if you open up the cockpit to look out you'll get your head ripped off," he said, warming up to his programming point. "To free yourself up for the next level of scale, you have to give up things that used to feel like freedom." (p. 196)

The Register: Benchmarks demolish Apple speed boasts Better increase the marketing budget again...

Information on Microsoft's "Shared Source" Licensing Useful summary, via O'Reilly

Arthur Andersen Is Said to Be Near a Sale to a Rival Lawsuits for sale, cheap

Dan'l Lewin is Microsoft's link to Silicon Valley You will be assimilated...

Flash MX Is a Big Step Forward "The result is unprecedented; Flash's integrated multimedia authoring power comes close to making standard websites obsolete."

The Register: Half US Net access is via broadband "One in five of US home Net users (22 million) access the Web using a broadband, said NetRatings."

Judge Says Ruling on Microsoft Won't Come Quickly "Litigation is not good for the soul, for the soul of an individual, or a company," said John L. Warden, a lawyer representing Microsoft. "The settlement ends a real drain on the time and energy of Microsoft people and lets them get back to business."

AOP: Aspect-Oriented Programming Enables Better Code Encapsulation and Reuse -- MSDN Magazine, March 2002 Good overview via Jon's Radio

The Internet Amenity "Ultimately, IP tone becomes valuable not when it is just in your hotel room but when you can count on it being everywhere. I have it in my house for guests. My friends have it in their offices. This is the friendly future that I see starting to shape up: instead of seeing Internet connectivity as a profit center, my guess is that businesses, universities and government facilities are going to provide IP tone to visitors for the same reason that they offer free local telephone service, water and the use of rest rooms—it makes the environment warmer, friendlier and more productive."

Blog This "Blogger.com, one of several sites at the heart of this phenomenon, now lists more than 375,000 registered users, adding 1,300 more each day. Users range broadly—from churches that have found blogging an effective tool for tending to their congregations’ spiritual needs to activists who see blogging as a means of fostering political awareness, and fans who use blogs to interact with other enthusiasts. Most often, bloggers recount everyday experiences, flag interesting stories from online publications and exchange advice on familiar problems."

Yahoo builds more fees into GeoCities - Tech News - CNET.com Boo hiss

The Register: Oracle loses Ellison's Java certification challenge "On Friday, though, the company's financial fortunes seemed irretrievably tied to databases and large e-commerce suites. Henley announced the third-quarter revenue had come in under expectations - flat. Software sales and operating income were the same as its second quarter, Oracle's worst performance in a decade, as organizations postpone spending on large software systems."

Untold History : The History of Flash via Dave Winer

Salon.com Technology | Waiting for Wi-Fi "Despite the buzz over unplugged coffeehouses, free community networks and war driving, jacking in to the wireless Net is still next to impossible"

Microsoft Becomes First Technology Company To Report Financials in XBRL Standard Never one to miss an XML-related opportunity...

Macromedia gives Flash a major overhaul "If developers start to incorporate Flash MX into Web sites, you're going to start seeing what could be the killer apps for the Internet," said Rikki Kirzner, research director at IDC. "This is really cool stuff."

RIM adds phone to BlackBerry - Tech News - CNET.com "First and foremost it's a BlackBerry, and it looks the same...the only difference is it has an earbud at the top and a little place you can put the GSM SIM card," said Mike Lazaridis, co-chief executive, at RIM.

Flash: More than just eye candy - Tech News - CNET.com Good preview

Former Chief of Hewlett Urges Rejection of Merger These guys are creating stiff competition for soap operas...

Q&A: Pieter Knook to Lead New Mobile Device and Network Service Provider Division "Knook: My priorities are three-fold: First: demonstrate our commitment to the roadmap we've set for the company around mobility by bringing the products to market that we intend to build so mobile customers can get the information they need any time, any place and on any device. Second: provide carriers with the software and services they need to commit to rolling out GPRS (General Packet Radio Services) infrastructure so data-oriented devices can shine, and demonstrate to customers the full features and value of next-generation mobile devices. Third: reinforce Microsoft's ability to be a valuable partner by helping service providers overcome the challenges they face. The way to do that is via adoption of Microsoft software and devices that can help them drive additional revenue streams."

Pew Internet & American Life Project "This longitudinal approach shows that over the course of a year people's use of the Internet gets more serious and functional. Internet users do more kinds of things online after they gain experience, especially related to their jobs, even as they spend a bit less time online during their typical sessions. As they gain experience, many Net surfers seemed less dazzled by the Internet. As a result, they are less likely to email a family member on a daily basis. Still, they are more likely than before to turn to the Internet to share worries or seek advice from those close to them. At the same time, users value the Internet as much or more than ever. This suggests that time online breeds competence and self-assurance for users; they are more efficient at what they do online and what they use email to accomplish. As Internet use is woven more into the daily lives of users, they find ways to get more out of it while spending less time with it" (via Farber, Winer, others...)

WSJ.com: Is Independence a Strength for BEA? Or a Weakness? "BEA's Kaiger counters that bundling is not a problem because loyal users will buy BEA's software based on merit over IBM's. "You date your hardware vendor, but you marry your software vendor. We don't really see bundling as an issue," Kaiger says."

Microsoft delays shipping Windows .NET Server "The product is feature-complete. Now we're focusing on fit, finish, performance and trustworthiness," O'Brien said.

Defunct Industry Standard Magazine Lives On In Spam via Dave Farber

White House spurns tech programs left over from Clinton presidency At least they're consistent...

AT&T Broadband Internet Service®: Personal Web Pages These are instructions for the useless ATTBI FTP service, which doesn't work with Blogger (requires posting computer to be connected via AT&T Broadband Internet Service). Now you know why I opted for a free blog at blogspot.com