Mercury News | 07/31/2002 | Ellison swears numbers are true Now we have two-phase commit for financial reporting?

Microsoft, AT&T Wireless Forge Deal "The deal means that within the past 18 months, Microsoft has forged partnerships with at least five major wireless carriers in the United States to carry a cell phone or wireless device that runs a Microsoft operating software."

ABC 7 Clinton Interview "WJLA/Reporter Rebecca COOPER: President Clinton, do you think President Bush's economic policies are taking this country in the right direction?
CLINTON: I don't think I should offer an opinion on that. I think its a mistake for them to try and blame us for it though, because we actually have a clear and unbroken record of trying to clear up a lot of these corporate abuses. We started back in '98 warning about the accounting problems and when my Securities and Exchange Commissioner tried to stop the Enron accounting practice of accountants being the consultants, the other party stopped us, and their main lobbyist was Harvey Pitt, who is now head of the SEC." (via Camworld)

Spending in Web Services Tools Market Stalled "It seems that hype is finally being lasso'd in by reality. Web Services have been hyped up as though they were the next big thing. For people heavily involved in integration projects, it probably is. For the rest of us writing enterprise applications, WS won't change our jobs or affect us."

Sun Deals Widens Microsoft-Apple Rift "A report in C/NET-ZDNET (they're the same now, right?) this weekend either explains the secret reason for the very public Microsoft-Apple rift that came to light two weeks ago, or provides all the ammunition Microsoft needs to finally bail from its failing relationship with the Mac maker. According to the report, Apple is working with Sun Microsystems to port the OpenOffice and StarOffice office productivity suites to Mac OS X, providing Mac users with free or low-cost alternatives to Microsoft's pricey Office v. X, which retails for $500."

Read All About It "A company called ProQuest has digitized every back issue of the Times, from cover to cover. Every news article, editorial, photograph, cartoon and advertisement is included, and using a fully searchable file, readers can see articles as they originally appeared in print."

Comments: Rose-colored glasses Great example of Dave Winer's controversial influence and modus operandi

The Register: Sun considers messaging and database move Considering Sun's track record for software acquisitions, MSFT probably hopes they will go for it...

Web Site Lets Visitors Peek at Corporate Carping Pretty bold (and weird)

Technology Climate Is Gloomy, but Its Future Still Seems Bright "Given the free fall of technology stocks and the waves of layoffs and bankruptcies lately, now might seem an odd time to say this, but it's true: the digital revolution rolls on, and it may have only just begun."

Gates Evaluates .NET, Promises Future Advances "What if you bet the company on a new technology that no one understands let alone uses?" I guess the millions of developers using VS.NET are confused...

Ziff Davis Is Said to Plan a Bankruptcy Yikes

Can AOL Keep Its Subscribers in a New World of Broadband? "The biggest problem for America Online is that there are half as many people coming online for the first time than there were two years ago. ...
"The number of U.S. households with dial-up has peaked," said Jed Kolko, an analyst with Forrester Research. "U.S. consumers are switching from dial-up to broadband faster than new households are getting dial-up."

Boston Globe Online / Business / Microsoft poised to lead .Net shift Interesting same-day perspective compared with WSJ article below

WSJ.com - Boom Town: Microsoft's .Net 'Marketecture' Is Lacking in Real Innovation More mainstream press MSFT-bashing

ZDNet: Tech Update: Enterprise Applications / Synch of the spiderman Must be recycling week...

Hit Where It Hurts By Ted Kaczynski
In case you've been wondering what's on the Unabomber's mind recently (via robot wisdom). Example: "8. All Biotechnology Must Be Attacked As A Matter Of Principle."

Ftrain.com: August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web Interesting future scenario, via camworld

The Register: IBM and Linux our biggest threats - Microsoft "However, Flessner articulated Microsoft's response to Linux. "Linux is free like a puppy. It looks free but when you get all the pieces around it, it doesn't work out so free. There's a lot more than I/O and memory management to make up an operating system.""

A Hard Drive for the Hip Pocket "But even a 40-gigabyte minidrive costs less than $350, about half what you would have paid in 1997 for a bulky 4-gigabyte external drive."

From a Broken Laser Pointer to an Online Auction Giant "EBay makes money by brokering deals. But what happens when buyers and sellers cut out the middleman and deal direct? At eBay you search for the item you want. But you can also search the Web as a whole. In the long run, we won't need two separate levels of search. Eventually we will use the fabric of cyberspace itself, not eBay, as our switchboard.
But chances are eBay will somehow still be making money off the deal."

I, Cringely | The Pulpit: The EBay Way "Let's put eBay in perspective. In terms of sales, the company is comparable in size to Amazon.com. But Amazon's sales are primarily composed of goods while eBay's sales are composed almost entirely of commissions -- commissions that average around five percent of the value of goods bought and sold. So while Amazon and eBay are both around a billion in sales, eBay actually represents more than $20 billion in economic activity. That makes eBay the third largest U.S. retailer after Wal-Mart and Sears, and three times the size of AOL, the other Internet merchandizing powerhouse. It took Wal-Mart almost 30 years to have the economic impact eBay has reached in five years. And profits? eBay makes more profit than all the rest of the retail Internet businesses COMBINED. It is a money machine. In retail economic terms, eBay IS the Internet."

Net Users Try to Elude the Google Grasp Scripta manent ("the words fly away, the writings remain", even if sometimes they're not really your writings...)

Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows: Windows .NET Server RC 1 reviewed (Part One) "Windows Server has grown up dramatically since the early NT days, and it now scales up to the most scalable and advanced hardware on the planet." First detailed review I've come across.

AOL Reneges on AIM Interoperability Promise "Maybe I'm just old fashioned, but if the task was a condition of the merger, and one AOL openly agreed to, then AOL should be forced to comply. If the government can come down hard on Microsoft for not honoring its legal agreements, it can--and should--come down equally hard on AOL for what is obviously a far more gratuitous violation."

Bill Gates' Web Site - Remarks by Bill Gates, .NET Briefing Day A pretty frank and objective assessment, in my opinion. I'm surprised he reinforced some of the early HailStorm and Passport FUD (e.g., MSFT never wanted to keep all of a user's data exclusively on MSFT servers -- or perhaps more precisely they knew it would be unrealistic to try).

Gates: Slow going for .Net - Tech News - CNET.com Some factual excerpts from the speech above, but I think the overall tone of the article is a bit off

Bill Gates Details Vision for Phase Two of .NET and Future of Web Services "In just two years, we've gone from debut to delivery of the first generation of Microsoft .NET. It's incredibly gratifying to see both its technology and its value to customers proven in the marketplace," Gates said during a briefing for press and analysts. "The broad industry consensus around XML-based Web services gives us a tremendous foundation for breakthrough work in many areas. The focus of phase two of .NET is on software that creates connected customer experiences that transform the way people live and work." Includes useful summary of what's next in .NET.

[ ..:: wu :: riddles(intro) ::..] "hardcore tech-interview style riddles, not gaussian elimination logic puzzle fluff" via Slashdot (with the usual ensuing performance challenges)

urbanev: || thinking in flash || Thoughtful assessment of Flash Communication Server; via Flashblog

Microsoft Exchange Server Gains More New Users than Closest Competitor by 2-to-1 in 2001 "Despite Cautious Enterprise IT Spending, Microsoft Exchange Continues to Grow; It Now Is the Leader for Messaging Applications In New and Total Users." Took them more than a decade, but they apparently finally took the lead in news sales and installed base...

Microsoft Business Solutions Gathers Technical , Developer Partners at Tech 2002 to Showcase .NET-Connected Business Solutions Fargo in July -- go figure...

WSJ.com: Users Still Waiting for Microsoft To Deliver on Promise of '.NET' Two years ago, at the tail end of the dot-com boom, Microsoft Corp. pledged to completely overhaul its business through a new Internet strategy. In touchy-feely TV ads, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates promised a "new generation" of software that would "understand your voice, anticipate your needs, protect your privacy and connect you to the Internet wherever you are." ... In a slick, all-day strategy session unveiling the revamping, dubbed "Microsoft.NET," the company showed videos of grandparents receiving digital photos zapped right to table-top picture frames, and a high-school student tapping away on a tablet-style computer on the bleachers outside school. ... There's only one nagging issue: Little of it has come to pass. ... "If they could mix and match, and play better with others, that would really help," says analyst Rick Sherlund of Goldman Sachs. Some, though, say the collapse of the Internet bubble means Microsoft's .NET plans aren't as pressing as two years ago. No company wound up developing a credible Web-based competitor to Microsoft's cash-cow Office word-processing and e-mail product, for instance, SG Cowen's Mr. Brosseau points out. "Nobody's threatening them," he says." (I think the concluding observation is much more useful than the attempt to scandalize the fact that few grandparents are beaming photos around living rooms.)

Salon.com Salon gets into the blog hosting business

HP to quit supplying printers to Dell - Tech News - CNET.com "We're befuddled that the mere possibility of us entering the printer business would make them so nervous," Maher said. "It seems counterintuitive that in this market you would want to make it harder for customers to get your products."

AOL not sold on IM interoperability - Tech News - CNET.com Let's hope the govt isn't too busy with MSFT to ignore this

O'Reilly Network: OScon replete with database topics [July 22, 2002] "Relational databases are still the stars of the data storage firmament. After them, the next most popular type of databases are the even older DBM key/value type. These old stand-bys have been challenged by companies pushing object-oriented databases, and recently XML databases have emerged with claims on the future. ... Why haven't the challengers won out? Perhaps it's because object-oriented and XML solutions demand that the organization data be limited for the convenience of the programming language. Organizations that invest huge sums into collecting data want all the richness and sophistication they can get in searching that data, and the best we have at this point is still the relational database. So we're going to have to deal for some time to come with painful clashes between the relational model and the model offered by whatever language we choose to work in."

Microsoft embeds HailStorm into .Net "Are we calling it HailStorm going forward? No. We're calling it Web services and .Net," Microsoft's Mangione said. "But a lot of the thinking around schemas, how you get multiple objects -- frankly, there was, in some cases, overlap with other parts of the company. We were heading down a path of developing multiple ways to access [and store] data, multiple ways to store a contact. And that didn't make sense."

ZDNet: Story: How Microsoft plans to take over your living room "The bottom line is that today's (well, this fall's) Media Center PC is just the opening salvo in Microsoft's bid to control home entertainment in the same way it already dominates home computing. My bet is that, in five years, a personal computer (or something essentially like one but with a more purpose-specific design) will be the center of many families' entertainment centers, and that PC technology will have radically changed the consumer electronics business."

Economist.com: The great telecoms crash "The telecoms bust is some ten times bigger than the better-known dotcom crash: the rise and fall of telecoms may indeed qualify as the largest bubble in history. Telecoms firms have run up total debts of around $1 trillion. And as if this were not enough, the industry has also disgraced itself by using fraudulent accounting tricks in an attempt to conceal the scale of the disaster."

RealNetworks Poses Challenge to Microsoft Interesting strategy

WSJ.com - Technology: Microsoft Posts 10% Revenue Gain On Strong Software, Xbox Sales "These guys are just rolling in money," Credit Suisse First Boston analyst George Gilbert said. ... "They're producing very strong, top-line results, while at the same time, pushing recognized revenue out," said Credit Suisse analyst Mr. Gilbert. "Tell me in this environment how anybody else could do that." Mr. Gilbert said he had expected Microsoft to glean $6.3 billion in new, annuity-like revenue by July 31; Microsoft now says it already has $6 billion of such sales in the bank, he said."

Microsoft to offer stand-alone Active Directory "In the future, Microsoft believes the directory and the database will become one. "How many people can program against a directory? A large number. How many applications use a database? A large number," says Kim Cameron, directory architect for Microsoft. "Right now your identity and authentication data is segregated in the directory with its own protocols, it is hard to join with the database." Cameron says a lot of challenges have to be overcome to converge the two but that Microsoft will eventually integrate the two. He would not specify a timeframe."

Top AOL Executive Resigns in Management Shake-Up "Now that both Mr. Levin and Mr. Pittman are gone, some on Wall Street are turning their attention to the role of Steve M. Case, once the chairman of America Online and now chairman of AOL Time Warner. Mr. Case pulled off one of the most advantageous deals in business history for America Online's shareholders by managing to acquire Time Warner with AOL's inflated shares." I for one would not bet against Steve Case, if he's up for the challenges.

Is IBM Toast? Harsh... via Dave Farber

With Upgrade to Software, MSN May Nip at AOL's Heels "The MSN 8 software represents an effort by Microsoft to catch up in areas where AOL is still perceived to have an advantage. It will allow parents to control and monitor their children's use of the Internet and will offer a variety of methods to block unwanted junk e-mail. Microsoft is also including a variety of features it had been selling on a stand-alone basis. For example, the Internet software includes the photo editing capability of Microsoft's $39.95 Picture-It software and a bill-paying service that had cost $5.95 a month on its MSN Money Central Web site."

Experience Windows Powered Smart Displays at Home Intriguing and well produced video, but I hope that isn't a bathroom the guy in the final scene is walking into with his tablet in hand...

Microsoft Maps Out Next .Net Framework Code-name updates -- Whidbey (CLR 2) and Everett (CLR 1.1). Surprised to see Whidbey dates -- similar to Exchange-on-Yukon, there seems to be some major schedule recalcs going on

Modeling Usage Low; Developers Confused About UML 2.0, MDA "Only about one-third of developers recently surveyed said they use UML, and not a single respondent believes that code generated from models is generally production-ready."

Microsoft to Ship New Exchange, Outlook in Mid-2003 "Malcolm Pearson, general manager of Microsoft's Exchange Server Business Unit, said that Microsoft will deliver the SQL Server data store in a future Exchange release, code-named Kodiak. The reason for the delay, he said, is that the new SQL Server version, code-named Yukon, won't be ready in time for Exchange 2003." (The Cairo disease is apparently still active...)

Microsoft Unveils Windows XP Media Center Edition, Previously Code-Named "Freestyle" Consistent with the overall XP approach -- take a bunch of stuff that's currently just a bit too arcane for most users to find worthwhile, integrate it, and put a nice user interface on top

HP exits e-business software market - Tech News - CNET.com Okay, so maybe Oracle won't buy HP's broken toys...

The Seattle Times: Business & Technology: Microsoft to reveal details of home media center, costing $1,500 "Called Windows XP Media Center Edition, the software will run a class of computers built to record and play music and television shows, as well as process words, crunch numbers and surf the Internet. ... The software displays a simplified control screen on the computer monitor and may be manipulated by remote control. It's designed to allow users to sit on a couch with friends as they peruse digital photos or watch DVDs on the computer monitor, rather than crowd around someone sitting at a keyboard."

Forbes.com: Microsoft to release new multimedia edition Windows XP "Microsoft Corp. announced an addition to its flagship Windows XP series of operating systems on Tuesday, Windows XP Media Center, which aims to transform desktop computers into remote-controlled digital entertainment hubs. ... Windows XP Media Center, formerly code-named 'Freestyle', is targeted at "digital media enthusiasts, college dorm rooms and teen bedrooms," said Jodie Cadieux, marketing manager at Microsoft's eHome division, which aims to make PCs more than just a business and communication tool."

Microsoft to Exit Mac Market If Sales Continue to Lag "On the eve of Apple Computer's semiannual MacWorld event, Microsoft dropped a bombshell on the company: Work harder to accelerate Mac OS X sales or Microsoft will exit the Mac market forever. Many Mac developers share this sentiment; Mac OS X has not sold well, as reported recently in WinInfo Daily."

Q&A: What "Titanium" Will Mean for End Users and IT Pros. "Titanium is being built on the same code base as Exchange 2000, and therefore will use the same storage engine that is currently in Exchange 2000. Titanium will be a smooth upgrade for our customers. We are continuing to make long-term investments to develop our next generation messaging platform, called Kodiak, around Microsoft’s vision for unified data that will first appear in "Yukon," the codename for the next release of SQL Server. It will be several years before this technology is ready to be a mainstream upgrade for our current customers. And I think it’s really important that our Exchange customers know that, with future versions of Exchange, we are not going to require e-mail administrators to become database administrators."

The Seattle Times: Business & Technology: Microsoft starts meter running: To get regular upgrades, businesses will pay by the year "Basically Microsoft is doing away with upgrade discounts for businesses, and instead encouraging them to sign up for annual contracts called "software assurance," which provides the latest software for a fixed annual fee."

Silicon Valley Without Trimmings "It was the economist Thorstein Veblen who first captured the foibles of the recently rich in devastating fashion more than a century ago in "Theory of the Leisure Class." He argued that there was an innate urge to consume as an end in itself and that an entire social class defined itself by what it could buy."

PCWorld.com - Do We Really Want the Wireless Web? Apparently not, at least not the majority of potential users

Former Employee: WebGain Out Of Business - CRN.com - 7/9/02 6:47:29 PM The rest of the story...

Oracle Apes Microsoft Strategy "Bill [Gates is] a genius," Ellison joked yesterday. "We don't need him working here. We just read what he says: It's cheaper."

Microsoft Makes Wireless Networking a Snap "Today, we're announcing that Microsoft plans to enter the wireless networking market. We will be bringing a line of Wi-Fi hardware products - ones that use the 802.11b wireless standard -- to market later this year. These products will enable consumers to set up a wireless network quickly and easily so they can share their broadband Internet connections, files and printers with the other computers in their home or small office."

Silicon Valley's New Pessimists Talk of Pain Beyond the PC "To grasp the depth of the Valley's decline from its peak, it is only necessary to review the fortunes of the Fast 50, an annual list of the region's fastest-growing companies maintained by Joint Venture: Silicon Valley, a coalition of government, corporate and civic groups. ... Of the top 10 companies on the list in 2001, only one, eBay, was profitable in the last quarter. Two companies, Excite@Home and Exodus Communications, filed for bankruptcy protection and have since been acquired. Seven others on the list had losses in each of the last four quarters, including Commerce One, which reported a staggering $220 million loss in the first quarter of this year. Finally, the stocks of four of the eight survivors in this group are now trading for less than $1."

Expedia zips into business travel, buying Metropolitan "We could have acquired those corporate customers by pitching them," Bishop said. But "this was a more efficient means to accelerate our entry into the corporate travel market."

Macromedia Flash Communication Server MX Personal; Professional Editions reviewed by PC Magazine "With the release of Flash Communication Server MX (Personal Edition, $499 direct; Professional Edition, $4,500), Macromedia is poised—once again—to fundamentally transform the Internet experience. Described in the simplest terms, Flash Communication Server MX handles two-way, multiuser transmissions of audio, video, text, and graphics. With this technology, developers can create high-performance Web applications for tasks including real-time video broadcasting, whiteboard collaboration, rich-media messaging, and online video and audio recording."

Windows A Software Engineering Odyssey Fascinating history from an insider's perspective, via Slashdot

Microsoft Delivers Critical Guidance and Tools For Enterprise Customers Using Visual Studio .NET "Microsoft Corp. today announced the delivery of the Microsoft® .NET Architecture Center and the availability of the Visual Studio® .NET Integration software development kit (SDK), providing enterprise customers with a resource center for architectural guidance and integration tools necessary to help development teams build well-designed .NET applications quickly."

DigiPortal ChoiceMail Interesting brute-force approach to spam management, reviewed by Walt Mossberg in today's WSJ

Wi-Fi Users: Chalk This Way "The iconic sign in a storefront window along downtown San Francisco's busy Folsom Street is there to alert passersby to the presence of an available 802.11b wireless network. Its double-curve symbol is one of the few physical manifestations of this year's fastest-spreading tech fad: warchalking."

Microsoft eyes Visa users with Passport - Tech News - CNET.com "The software giant will strike a partnership Tuesday with security-software maker Arcot Systems, which builds online payment systems for merchants and for banks that issue Visa and MasterCard credit cards. Arcot makes the systems behind Visa's own Verified by Visa program as well as a similar program in development at MasterCard. ... Under the deal, Microsoft and Arcot plan to offer, later this fall, a service that will let banks require computer users to type in their Passport username and password to authenticate Visa or MasterCard credit cards."

Macromedia gets chatty "Part of it is the emotional element of communications," Lynch said. "Today, about the most you can do is add a smiley face to your e-mail. But think about when you can actually see or hear the person you're communicating with...We think this is a completely radical, disruptive technology."

Visual Studio Magazine - Leverage Current Apps With Web Services VSM: Where is Java/J2EE stronger?
Guida: J2EE is stronger in security, in transactional support, and in its mobile infrastructure. As a consulting company, we find J2EE in the enterprise. We do a lot of work down on Wall Street, in financial applications, where you see a lot of the early adopters of technology. We see big systems being built with J2EE. I think it might have had more to do with the OS and the hardware that brought Java to the enterprise—more than with the capabilities of Java and J2EE initially. Solaris and these bigger-iron systems were running big enterprise applications. From that, Java was a great language for building new solutions on these boxes. Today, Java's strength is its scalability and performance, and the fact that it's tried and true at this stage in the enterprise.

PC Expo 2002 Show Report "Confusingly for us, the Windows Mira tablet was also shown. This device isn't part of the Tablet OS and is designed to let you use your computer from a tablet-like device around the house. It uses the new Intel X-Scale processor and will be available this holiday season. At first you'll only be able to run one Mira session at a time, but there are plans to make concurrent sessions possible, essentially turning your PC into a home mainframe. Go ahead and laugh, but your desktop PC has considerably more processing power and storage space than mainframes of only a few years past. Of course, it's got a whole lot more OS overhead to cope with as well."

SD Times: NET Advancing Quickly on J2EE But research shows Java maintains strong position "In the survey, 78 percent of respondents indicated that they are currently developing for a Microsoft platform, with 28.6 percent stating that they are actively developing specifically for .NET or ASP.NET, Microsoft’s application server for the .NET platform. When asked about their plans for new applications being developed over the next 12 months, 72.5 percent said they would be developing for a Microsoft platform, only a small increase, while the .NET/ASP.NET planned usage for the next year nearly doubled, to 52.6 percent. ... By comparison, 48.8 percent of respondents indicated that they are currently developing apps for either Java 2 Standard Edition or Java 2 Enterprise Edition, and 51.8 percent said that they expect to be building new apps for J2SE or J2EE within the next year. That’s what you would call a statistical tie."

Net Gain (washingtonpost.com): 'Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web' by David Weinberger "Remember the Cluetrain Manifesto? In 1999, this peculiar document momentarily captured the fickle attention of the online world -- and ultimately inspired a bestselling business book. Taking the form of 95 short "Theses" ("Markets are conversations," "Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy"), the Manifesto was a petulant plea for "clueless" corporations to abandon their stuffy ways in favor of the freewheeling discourse of the online world. "You want us to pay?" the writers asked. "We want you to pay attention. . . . Drop your trip, come out of your neurotic self-involvement, join the party."
Given that the essence of the 95 Theses could be boiled down to perhaps a sentence or two, it's remarkable that the Manifesto writers managed to pull a whole book out of it. But such is the power of (dumb) ideas. Now David Weinberger, one of the authors of the Manifesto, has conjured up a book of his own, a baffling little volume that purports to offer a "unified theory of the web.""

Sales of PlayStation 2 Rise So that means ~65% increase for Sony, ~52% for MSFT, and ~21% for Nintendo. Hardly seems like endgame for MSFT at this point...

Tollbooth Technology Meets the Checkout Lane I don't understand this -- like credit cards (offering cash rebates, frequent flyer miles, whatever) are so inconvenient to use?

NYPress - Music - William S. Repsher - Vol. 15, Iss. 27: David Lowery Via robot wisdom weblog. "About to record their third album in 1986, Camper Van Beethoven retired to a cabin in Mammoth, CA, to write songs, and ended up recording a song-for-song tribute to Tusk. The tapes were shelved and lost for years ("Frankly, no one was looking for them," says Camper frontman David Lowery), but found recently and, with the help of some Mac iBook restructuring and studio polishing, released as a two-CD set (available at www.pitch-a-tent.com, with an official release on Aug. 13). Like the original, Camper’s Tusk is all over the place. They obviously had a great time howling portentous Stevie Nicks lines like, "track a ghost through the fog, baby." I recently exchanged e-mails on the topic with Lowery, who will be reuniting the band soon at the Knitting Factory."

72.3% of PVR Viewers Skip Commericals "New research into the controversial phenomenon of personal video recorders finds users skip commercials 72.3% of the time -- a much higher rate than those watching live TV or those using videotape recorders -- but they are least likely to pass over a beer or drug spot." Via Saltire, as is next link below

Economist.com | Weblogging "For all the costly and failed efforts by media companies to create and charge for online material, blogging suggests that the web works best as a link to other people—and a way of finding and raiding their content. As InstaPundit's Glenn Reynolds says, “the threat to big media is not to its pocketbook but to its self-importance.”"

DoCoMo Regains Top Spot for Mobile User Growth "NTT DoCoMo Inc (9437.T) regained the top spot in June for the number of new mobile phone subscribers in Japan after an offensive with new camera phones and other advanced handsets, industry data showed on Friday." (Including this for balance, since I noted the reverse trend earlier.)

ViewSonic: airpanel 100 Mira precursor function-alike

New Chips Can Keep a Tight Rein on Consumers "As chips get cheaper, products get smarter. Sometimes they can get too smart for their own good."

IP: more on Leader Views WorldCom as Security Issue for the Nation The rest of the story on Sidgemore -- amazing...

Microsoft on top, but lonely "Microsoft Corp., which surpassed General Electric Co. last month as the world's biggest company by market value, is the only technology stock remaining among the top 10, according to Bloomberg rankings. ... At the peak of the dot-com boom in 1999, seven of the 10 biggest companies were technology or telecommunications stocks. Since then, Cisco Systems Inc., Nokia Oyj, Lucent Technologies Inc., Intel, Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp. and Deutsche Telekom AG have dropped from the list."

iBATIS.com "JPetStore is a completely rewritten Pet Store application based on Sun's original J2EE Pet Store. The primary difference is that JPetStore uses a design competetive and comparable to the Microsoft .Net Pet Shop, but without its shortcomings.
The benefits of the JPetStore implementation are:
Vendor independence: including Database, Application Server and Operating System (tested with PostgreSQL, PointBase, Oracle, Tomcat, Windows, Linux and Solaris).
Very low implementation cost (FREE): all tools and runtime environments used in implementing JPetStore were open source freeware including Linux, Tomcat and PostgreSQL"

Eclipse 2.0 IDE Platform Released Skim some of the forum feedback -- the battle of the free Java IDEs...

Directory assistance for Web services? - Tech News - CNET.com "The idea of a public registry was ahead of its time because you have to have other parts, like service-quality guarantees and trust," Gartner analyst Daryl Plummer said. "People are using it now, but it's just experimentation. We are a good four to five years away."

Boston Globe Online / Business / Preliminary ruling seen favorable to Microsoft "A federal judge, in a preliminary ruling favorable to Microsoft Corp.'s antitrust settlement with the Justice Department, decided yesterday to weigh the settlement under a ''public interest'' standard that does not require that all antitrust violations be remedied."

John C. Malone's Enviable Position "Chalk up another victory for John C. Malone. While the downdraft in the wireless telecommunications sector has wiped out billions of dollars in other people's wealth, Mr. Malone is sitting pretty." Malone has a fascinating track record.

Boston Globe Online / Nation | World / 'America's Army' set for battle "Tomorrow, the Army will premiere its latest recruiting tool - a multiplayer computer game that will let thousands of would-be warriors do battle over the Internet. The new game, called America's Army, will be available for free download over the Internet, and will be offered on free CD-ROMs later this summer." Your tax dollars at work...

O'Reilly Network: Java FUD [July 02, 2002] and counter-FUD...

Q&A: Microsoft Seeks Industry-Wide Collaboration for "Palladium" Initiative Useful details and background

Microsoft set to release .Net tool for Java developers "The successor to Microsoft's Visual J++ tool, J# provides a transition for Java developers into Microsoft's XML Web services development effort, Microsoft said. The arrival of J# marks the availability of all Microsoft programming languages within its Visual Studio .Net platform, according to Microsoft. The platform also features Visual C++, Visual C# and Visual Basic."

WSJ.com - Technology: PC Industry Passes Milestone: One Billionth Was Sold in April" "One billion personal computers have been sold since the advent of the industry about 25 years ago, Gartner Inc. says. The research firm Monday plans to announce that the milestone was passed in April. Gartner is also predicting the industry can cross the two-billion-unit mark by 2007 or 2008. But doing that will require recovery from a slump of historic proportions."