NASA Tests Interplanetary Internet
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory uses technology developed by Vint Cerf called disruption-tolerant networking to transmit dozens of space images to and from a NASA science spacecraft located about more than 20 million miles from Earth. The first deep space communications network modeled on the Internet, DTN is expected to be used on a variety of upcoming space missions. - It took 10 years, ...
Adobe Maximizes the Flash Platform
At its Adobe MAX 2008 conference, Adobe advances the Flash platform and delivers Adobe Flash Catalyst, a professional interaction design tool, and the Adobe Cocomo platform-as-a-service solution for adding real-time social capabilities into RIAs (rich Internet applications). - ...
Microsoft Ships Robotics Developer Studio 2008
Microsoft releases a new version of its robotics platform, Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008 (Microsoft RDS), at the RoboDevelopment Conference. The new release includes a simple programming model to support building asynchronous applications, a set of visual authoring and simulation tools to aid in application development, and tutorials and sample code to help developers get started. ...
California First Lady Unveils Adobe-based Online Museum
California First Lady Maria Shriver unveiled the California Legacy Trails, a new Adobe software based interactive feature of the California Museum Web site that brings the states history and culture to life online. - SAN FRANCISCO -- California First Lady Maria Shriver and Adobe Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch unveiled the California Legacy Trails, a new interactive feature of the Cali...
Adobe Targets the Enterprise with SAP, Salesforce Integration
Adobe announces extended collaboration with SAP to help SAP developers build rich applications using Adobes tools. Meanwhile, a Salesforce.com executive states that Salesforce does much the same thing using Adobes front-end design and development tools. The enterprise is a key target for Adobe, said John Loiacono, senior vice president of Adobe's Creative Solutions Business Unit. - SAN FRAN...
Adobe Bringing Flash Player 10 to Smartphones
Adobe is working to deliver full Flash Player 10 technology to smartphones, including Windows Mobile devices, Symbian OS-powered devices and Google Android phones. And the company remains hopeful regarding the iPhone and BlackBerry. Kevin Lynch, Adobes CTO, demonstrated Flash Player 10 running on Windows Mobile, Symbian and Android at the Adobe MAX 2008 developer conference. - SAN FRANCISCO...
Adobe Bringing Flash Player 10 to Smart Phones
Adobe is working to deliver full Flash Player 10 technology to smart phones, including Windows Mobile devices, Symbian OS-powered devices and Google Android phones. And the company remains hopeful regarding the iPhone and BlackBerry. Kevin Lynch, Adobe's CTO, demonstrated Flash Player 10 running on Windows Mobile, Symbian and Android at the Adobe MAX 2008 developer conference. - SAN FRANCIS...
Adobe to Change Designer/Developer Game with Flash Catalyst
Adobe just might have a hit on its hands with its design tool, formerly known as Thermo, and now known as Adobe Flash Catalyst. The design tool is aimed at creating application interfaces and interactive content with out coding. - SAN FRANCISCO -- Now that Adobe has taken the technology it formerly referred to as quot;Thermo, quot; given it a product name and released an early preview ve...
Adobe Upgrades Flash Media Servers
Adobe announces Adobe Flash Media Server 3.5 and Adobe Flash Media Streaming Server 3.5 at its Adobe MAX 2008 conference. New features and functionality in both servers include: dynamic streaming to provide end-users with a broadcast-quality, uninterrupted viewing experience; improved content protection; and the ability to stream live and on-demand content with H.264 video files. - SAN FRAN...
Adobe, ARM Team to Boost Flash and AIR for ARM-Powered Devices
At the Adobe MAX 2008 conference, Adobe announces a partnership with ARM to optimize Adobe Flash and AIR for ARM-powered devices. The collaboration is expected to accelerate mobile graphics and video capabilities on ARM platforms to bring rich Internet applications (RIAs) and Web services to mobile devices and consumer electronics worldwide. - SAN FRANCISCO -- Adobe and ARM have announced a...
Adobe Advances Flash Platform with new AIR, Cloud, Flex Solutions
At its annual MAX user conference Adobe puts on the dog and serves up new tooling and other support for Flash. Adobe introduces Flex Builder “Gumbo,” Flash Catalyst – formerly known as “Thermo,” the availability of Adobe AIR 1.5, and a pre-release of the 64-bit Linux version of Adobe Flash Player 10. Adobe also opens up its cloud initiative, known as “Cocomo,” as a public beta. - SAN...
SpringSource Gains Momentum in Enterprise Java
SpringSource, maker of the open source Spring Framework, continues to gain momentum in the enterprise Java space as a lighter weight alternative to Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE), Rod Johnson, CEO of SpringSource talks to eWEEK about open source and the economy, the future of Spring and a lot more. - Rod Johnson, CEO of SpringSource, created the open source Spring Framework as a...
Taking COBOL to the Cloud
Micro Focus is gearing up to help enterprises move their legacy COBOL applications to the cloud, first on Microsofts Windows Azure and thenÂ…who knows? With its ongoing relationship with Microsoft, Micro Focus has helped enterprises migrate mainframe-based COBOL applications to Windows and .NET, and now is targeting the cloud. With this move, COBOL could join Python, Ruby and other modern langu...
Pimp My Programming Language
Its hard out here for a programmer! Should programmers be allowed to add “bling” to their language of choice? Programming language experts debate to what degree developers should be able to tweak standardized languages. - Should high-end programmers be allowed to modify or add extensions to the programming language they use?
That issue was among the points up for debate by a panel of prog...
Serena Delivers Application Development Management Solution
Serenas new Application Development Management (ADM) offering gives software development executives insight into development projects within the enterprise. Serena ADM provides a dashboard to look at various development metrics. The solution is provided as both an on-demand or on premises technology. - Serena Software has introduced a new solution called Application Development Management (...
eWEEK Labs Walk-through: SQL Anywhere Version 11
SQL Anywhere gives programmers full relational database access through SQL on a mobile device running Windows Mobile. - ...
Creating Windows Mobile Databases with SQL Anywhere
The SQL Anywhere product is an entire suite of database applications and servers. It runs on many platforms, including Windows Mobile. Using Visual Studio, programmers can develop database applications that run on a Windows Mobile device. - One of the biggest problems Ive run into when developing for mobile devices is data storage. Two problems come up. First, Ill often be synchronizing wit...
SpringSource Acquires Groovy, Grails Provider G2One
In a move that brings three elements for enterprise Java developers together, SpringSource acquired G2One. SpringSource is the maker of the Spring Framework and G2One is the provider of Groovy and Grails. Spring is a lightweight enterprise Java development platform, Groovy is a Java-based dynamic language that runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), and Grails is a Java-based web development fr...
President Defends Google Apps
There is a strong current of sentiment that Google Apps, specifically Google's Docs word processing, spreadsheet and presentation applications are designed mainly to distract Microsoft from extending its tendrils deeper into the Internet in areas such as search. Girouard denies this, noting that Apps were originally geared to give Google's 20,000-plus employees Web-based alternatives to Microso...
Microsoft and the 'Unwanted Modeling Language'
Microsoft's off-and-on relationship with the Unified Modeling Language illustrates how the company both competes with and supports various technologies. At first Microsoft refused to support UML, but when the company set its sights on software modeling as a core focus, developer demand for UML proved too strong to ignore. At Microsoft TechEd, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates preannounced Microsoft...
Not Enough Indians
There is no joy at Yahoo, for mighty Jerry has struck out.
This week Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang announced he was stepping down after 17 turbulent months as CEO of the big Internet portal -- a time in which the company rebuffed a buyout offer from Microsoft, flubbed an ad sales agreement with Google, and ended up being worth a third of its former self when the rest of the market is down only ...
Now For Something Completely Different
President-Elect Barack Obama has announced that when he's in office he'll appoint a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for the whole darned USA. Though Google CEO Eric Schmidt already said he isn't interested in the job, I am.
I accept, Mr. President.
And while the idea of Cringely for CTO may seem lame to most everybody I know (including my Mom), I think I can make a strong case for why I...
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Love-Hate
Steve Jobs is not like you and me. He has millions of customers, 32,000 employees, and a board of directors who think he can do no wrong. Running a company that is immensely profitable, gaining in market share, has no debt and $20 billion in cash, he can afford to make bold moves, the most recent of which is his decision to replace Tony Fadell, until moments ago head of the division that prod...
Azure Blues
It isn't very often I get to apply Moore's Law to a non-Information Technology business and rarer still that I can then relate the whole thing back to Microsoft, so I'm going for it. Here's what the solar power industry can teach us about Microsoft:
The wonderful thing about Moore's Law is what the lady at the bank called the "miracle of compound interest." That halving of manufacturing cost...
Collateral Damage
I am not a very sophisticated mobile phone user. I don't use most of the bells and whistles on my phone, probably because I don't know what they even are. But just because I'm an idiot about USING mobile phones doesn't mean I don't understand the emerging mobile market, to which I have been paying a lot of attention of late. And why not? As personal computers fade from what Al Mandel called...
Ctrl-Alt-Del
Apple last week introduced a pair of very nice notebook computers that, not at all surprisingly, looked like riffs on the MacBook Air. The company in a separate announcement released 600 high-definition television episodes through the iTunes Store. This week Apple will reportedly release new 20-inch and 24-inch iMacs, also for the Christmas season. Two weeks, three announcements, but what stri...
Cool Threads
A couple of columns ago we touched on the practical rebirth of parallel computing. In case you missed that column (it's in this week's links), the short version is that Moore's Law is letting us down a bit when it comes to the traditional way of increasing the power of microprocessors, which is by raising clock speeds. We've hiked them to the point where processors are so small and running so...
Off With Their Heads!
My promised column on threads will appear in this space on Friday. It would have appeared here today but the crumbling global financial system suddenly seemed a more appropriate topic.
We're in trouble and by "we" I mean the whole darned planet. What started as a mortgage problem in the U.S. has blown into global financial paralysis that threatens us all with recession and maybe even with de...
Data Debasement
Last week I was in Boston to moderate a panel at the MIT Technology Review's Emerging Technologies Conference -- one of those tech shindigs so expensive I can only attend as hired help. My panel was on parallel computing and it produced this column and another I'll file early next week. This week is about databases and next week is about threads. Isn't this a grand time to be a nerd?
Than...
Test Headline
Test Body
The Cringely Plan
In the early 1980s I was a volunteer firefighter for a tiny community in the Santa Cruz Mountains of Northern California. We all lived in a beautiful redwood forest and our task was to keep that forest from burning down in a huge conflagration, taking us all with it. The job was made all the harder because our little part of paradise hadn't burned since the 1920s, so there was 60+ years of fl...
Door Number Three
I'll begin this third and (I promise) last column on IT management with a confession: I have been fired from every job I have ever held. This is certainly not something I set out to do, nor did I even realize it until one day my young and lovely wife mentioned that I had never told her about voluntarily leaving any position. It's not that I've had so many jobs, either. This one and the one b...
Leadership
Last week's column on bad IT management and the strong response from readers that followed show this to be a huge issue. There are WAY too many IT managers who either can't or shouldn't manage technical teams. Last week I maintained that having a firm technology base, or at least the ability and willingness to acquire one, was essential for good managers. While readers got carried away with ...
Fire Your Boss
This week marks the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the U.S. This week is also a time when the world economy is under stress comparable or greater to that imposed seven years ago. Whatever you are feeling in your wallet, I can't overemphasize the impact the current global credit crunch is having on our economy and that of other nations, including Germany and Japan. We're...
Doomsday
This was the week Google surprised the world with Chrome, its own open source web browser. Just imagine the deadly effect that had on a dozen or more browser-specific start-ups in Silicon Valley. Lots of readers are wondering what I think of Chrome, like my opinion really matters. Chrome is okay -- faster, but not faster enough to make me change for that reason alone. It's better than IE and al...
How Much is Enough?
While to regular readers this may seem an odd time of the week to see a new column from me, get used to it, because I'm deliberately increasing the frequency of I, Cringely columns to something greater than one per week yet still possibly less than two. In part this is my response to having more than ever to say. It's also an attempt to create more opportunities for you to view the ads we don...
What Did You Say?
Like a few million other people I recently bought an iPhone 3G. But unlike a few million other people I bought TWO of them -- one for my young and lovely wife. That puts me in the rare position to actually speak from experience about a current networking issue: what's the deal with these iPhones? Is it the phone or the network that is causing problems? And the answer is: both.
Our experience...
Leading Men
Leading indicators are measurements that change over time and suggest future trends for important second-order results like population growth and economic development. Economists in particular are often looking for indicators that have been known historically to lead the overall economy. If unemployment goes down, for example, it is a good bet that shortly thereafter income will rise and the ...
Frontier Daze
One of the great strengths of the Internet as a communication and entertainment medium has always been its lack of security, a fact that seems to pass over the heads of many "experts" today. Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf could easily have added robust security to TCP/IP, but they deliberately chose not to with the idea that innovation would be encouraged by making the Internet a wide-open space. It wa...
Computer security's dubious future
As long-time readers already know, I?m a big fan of Bruce Schneier, CTO and founder of BT Counterpane. Besides being a cryptographic and computer security authority, cryptographic algorithm creator, and author of many best-selling books on security, Bruce produces some of the most relevant conversations on computer security. I consider his books, Cryptogram newsletter, and blog must-reads for a...
Is your Web site FIPS compliant?
I?ve been involved in a lot of FIPS-compliance Web site testing lately. I?m a crypto hobbyist, not a crypto expert, so I hesitate to write about it, but I?ll explain the basics as well as I understand them. Crypto experts, please write in if I messed up something important.
Computer security: Why have least privilege?
My previous column on the questionable long-term effects of least privilege created a firestorm of controversy and discussion. Personally, I think controversy is good if it gives people on both sides of the argument a chance to reconsider their previous conclusions. If the argument changes your mind, then maybe your original conclusions needed more consideration. And if it strengthens your supp...
File sharing beyond the firewall
Conventional storage systems work well for local file sharing, but no system I can think of can help you share files outside your organization, unless you commit to cobbling together an in-house solution.
Make interoperability the goal
Getting storage vendors to play together nicely is no easy task. When they do, it is an event worthy of pause -- even if the gathering proves more about self-service than boosting the interoperability of their wares.
Strategic security: Get a handle on authentication
It's a common dilemma: You host multiple Web-accessible applications, for both internal customers and external users. A few of your developers are keeping up on the last programming trends and security models, while some of your highest-seniority employees are stuck in programming models outdated a decade ago. You've got a hodgepodge of access and authentication methods, along with a lot of cli...
Control user installs of software
I've written many times over the years, including as recently as last week, that letting users execute and install their own software will always allow viruses, worms, and Trojans to be successfully installed. Traditionally, I've recommended that users not have admin or root access, that they let system administrators choose what software is allowed and what is blocked. But this recommendation ...
Smaller drives nurture green IT
Infortrend? quietly marked a storage milestone last week, shipping the EonStor B12, the first enterprise-class array based on 2.5-inch drives. Combining power and reliability in a small size, the B12 could become the measuring stick for all storage arrays in its class, surpassing those that mount 3.5-inch drives in both efficiency and performance/space ratio.
EMC's solid-state play begs for benchmarks
I would bet dollars against pennies you didn't miss the EMC buzz about SSDs (solid-state drives) in Symmetrix. The vendor carefully orchestrated the announcement in hopes of capitalizing on the most interesting innovation to its portfolio in a long time.
Internet security: What will work
In the first column of this year, I discussed computer security outlook and hopes for 2008. I forecast more of the same that we saw in 2007: more spam, more malware, more bad guys basically owning the Internet and our connected computers. I don't see any trends or new leaders with significant power to change the status quo.
Dell could best EMC in joint AX4 release
As you may have heard, Dell and EMC this week trumpeted branded versions of the Clariion AX4 storage solution -- in Dell's case, the AX4-5 -- aimed at SMBs. Developed jointly, the technology differs little, yet market strategy may mean Dell will reap deeper rewards.
Security design: Why UAC will not work
It's security's dirty little secret: Not having your users logged in as root or administrator will not stop malware.
Security predictions for 2008
At the beginning of each year I like to talk about what did or didn?t happen during the past year, and what to expect in the coming year. Unlike past years, I?ll try not to get too emotionally ramped up on all the failures.
Stop the big-drive addiction
Looks can be deceiving. Take Hitachi GST's recent additions to its Travelstar line. The 2.5-inch drives may not look that much different than other small form factor drives, but one glance at their specs is enough to see the beginning of a storage revolution away from 3.5-inch drives.
A side of hash
A hash is cryptographic algorithm that attempts to uniquely describe inputted content by outputting a value that is unique for a given piece of inputted content. A good hash algorithm has several characteristics, including:
HP hones blade management
To paraphrase a sentence often attributed to Mark Twain, everybody talks about the cost of managing storage, but nobody does anything about it.
Ask better password questions
I just love how many Web sites take my complex, hard-to-guess password and make it as easy to crack as guessing my favorite color or the city of my birth. It seems nearly every Web site comes with user-accessible, self-service, password reset questions, and nearly all of those same sites make resetting or obtaining my password magnitudes easier than actually knowing my correct password. Thanks.
New fast lanes to storage
Cutting through the sales-pitch hype of Tier 1 vendor presentations often means checking in with their suppliers. After all, conversations with suppliers tend to reflect what Tier 1 vendors ask of them. Less sales-oriented, these talks can be refreshing in that they are less likely to be sugarcoated with hype and more likely to be built on facts.
Getting entrepreneurial in 2008
When I wrote my first InfoWorld article back in December 2001, I had absolutely no clue what I was talking about. Reading back over that masterpiece, "Dawn of the real-time enterprise," is scary. I didn't understand the technology, the acronyms, or how to filter out the inevitable vendor hype. I called friends to ask, what's J2EE? What's JMS? What's OLAP? And when they explained it, I pretended...
When you shop for storage hardware, bring a lawyer
Is there a worse time to start thinking of what to put in next year?s storage budget than just before the holidays? Probably not <grin>, but setting aside the nuts and bolts of storage now so that you can focus on the legal implications of next year?s purchases will be the best present you can give yourself before the new year.
PC Market Poised For Dramatic Growth in Emerging Markets
Sometime next year, there will be more than 1 billion PCs in use around the world, if market forecasts from Forrester are to be believed.
Greener Than Thou: Has Dell Planted the Deepest Stake of the High-Tech Giants?
Whether you consider it real or rhetoric, Dell and its eponymous founder Michael Dell are pouring a whole lot of fertilizer onto their environmental initiatives.
Green Technology Kudos Due HP
Bully for them: HP has achieved the first Gold level environmental rating from EPEAT (the highest one possible) for one of its business desktops. Does it matter to you?
Now That's A Toxic Avenger!
I was inspired by this green technology video segment about a young man who essentially saved his own life by garbage-picking for discarded computers, refurbishing them and passing them along for their own second chance.
What Can The Channel Learn From Dell?
Now that Dell has declared its intentions for the channel, it's time to watch what the big systems vendors do in the way of developing their own services capabilities.
Geeks On The Street: What Feedback Do You Get From Your Techies?
The Geek Squad isn't just an outbound techie network. The Geeks are information gathers the average citizen can trust.
Reporter's Notebook: Wipro's Five Tips For Improving Customer Satisfaction
Being disciplined about apply quality frameworks to IT projects can aid in improving customer satisfaction. At least that's the viewpoint of Wipro.
More Data Privacy Stats, Plus, Bell Hosts A Royal Visit
Twofold reason for this post. First, there are some more dismal stats out on data privacy breaches. On a lighter note, for you anglophiles out there, I learned last night that distributor Bell Microproducts was the recipient yesterday of a royal visit from Prince Edward. Yes, THAT Prince Edward, the queen's youngest son.
Is E-Commerce Going Mainstream?
Clothing overtook computer hardware and software as the most-shopped e-commerce item in 2006, usurping the latter category in online sales for the first time.
IBM Ponies Up Some Green Stuff For Green Tech Movement
Think the green technology movement is just a fad? Well, for IBM it just became a $1 billion per year fad.
Go With The Flow: An Intriguing Inventory Management Tool
I am stuck thinking about a tool called FreeFlow. Its offering is a hosted inventory asset management system, something that a vendor and its supply chain can use to make excess inventory available to those who have a better shot at selling it.
Second Life: Ready Or Not, Here It Comes
I tried to join the hip crowd last week for an IBM experiment: a storage product launch it chose to hold in Second Life. While I'm usually on time for most meetings (traffic willing), I became hopelessly lost on my way to this virtual one.
Being Green Is Within Your Power
It being Earth Week or Earth Month and all, I'm actually surprised that more technology vendors haven't been making a bigger deal out of their efforts to contribute to the green IT movement.
Identity Angst (Or Who Are You? I Hope Not Me)
The past two weeks have prompted some soul-searching on the part of many retailers and just about any company that deals with POS or e-commerce transactions. It's just another indication that security know-how is core to just about every solution provider's agenda.
Refurbishers Could Make Going Green Easier
Slowly but surely, the bigger technology recycling and refurbishment operations are reaching out to include technology solution providers in their plans.
Can Open Source Cure Global Software Piracy?
Most software born in the United States is priced completely wrong for emerging markets, given their economic state. So why should we be surprised at the state of global software piracy?
Accenture Fuels My Mobile Obsession
Accenture hopes to make mobile devices, or cell phones if you prefer, a whole lot more personal. Are you ready for a pocket conscience?
Wiki Mania, Or Must We Share and Share Alike? (Yes, We Must)
Despite the security implications, ad hoc communication over the proverbial corporate firewall is good for business. It will start to happen with or without the blessing of the boss.
Would You Like That Data Center To Go?
Rackable Systems is touting the first sale of a brand-new technology platform that it is positioning as a "mobile data center." (Read, data center in a truck.)
Is Commoditization Coming For Managed Services?
How easy should it be to become a managed service provider? Or, simply, to offer managed services?
BackBerry Storm makes the grade
Keith Shaw, Network World's resident gadget guy, makes no bones about being a big iPhone fan, so his newly posted review of the BlackBerry Storm should carry a little added weight for those considering one of the latter:
In the less-than-24-hours that I've had the device and have been able to do a basic set of tests on the BlackBerry Storm (on sale Friday, Nov. 21, for $199.99 after $50 ...
BlackBerry Storm makes the grade
Keith Shaw, Network World's resident gadget guy, makes no bones about being a big iPhone fan, so his newly posted review of the BlackBerry Storm should carry a little added weight for those considering one of the latter:
In the less-than-24-hours that I've had the device and have been able to do a basic set of tests on the BlackBerry Storm (on sale Friday, Nov. 21, for $199.99 after $50 ...
Dow closes below 8,000 ...
... which I believe is the number of people who still have jobs.
Former Fake Steve Jobs bags real blog
Real Dan Lyons, formerly not known and then ultimately unmasked as Fake Steve Jobs , is apparently abandoning his personal blog at RealDanLyons.com . Why? Seems his real bosses at Newsweek didn't much cotton to a post in which Real Dan called the real public relations professionals at Yahoo "lying sacks of," ahem, think manure.
Jordan Golson of The Industry Standard , a Network World ...
Former Fake Steve Jobs bags real blog?
Real Dan Lyons, formerly not known and then ultimately unmasked as Fake Steve Jobs , is apparently abandoning his personal blog at RealDanLyons.com . Why? Seems his real bosses at Newsweek didn't much cotton to a post in which Real Dan called the real public relations professionals at Yahoo "lying sacks of," ahem, think manure.
Jordan Golson of The Industry Standard , a Network World ...
Recalling the indignity of being FMPd ... and fearing the ax may fall again
Last week's post about corporate tap-dancing around the word layoff -- 'Synergy-related headcount restructuring' and other euphemisms for 'you're fired' -- hit uncomfortably close to home for a number of readers. Henry Farkas , a senior Unix administrator for a Connecticut-based health insurance behemoth, sends along these thoughts:
I am an old IBMer. My division was sold to AT&T. Som...
Just drove by $1.97 a gallon
I know many of you have already had the pleasure of seeing sub-$2 gas, but this was a first for me ... in a long time. Even though I knew it was coming, I was still surprised by my surprise at seeing it.
McNuggets turn 25; fan site to turn stomachs
Fan sites for famous commercial products are generally contrived and almost always tacky, so there's little reason to get too fussy about Nuggnuts.com , which McDonald's debuted today to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Chicken McNugget.
Nevertheless, I sincerely recommend that you avoid reading/listening to the "Nuggnuts Pledge" within an hour on either side of eating.
From the com...
Better Business Bureau takes aim at popcorn-popping viral marketers
You might think the Better Business Bureau would have better business to attend to than trying to protect gullible Internet video watchers from the most preposterous fakeries perpetrated by viral marketers.
You'd be wrong.
You might also believe that four ringing cell phones can emit enough heat and/or radiation to pop popcorn, in which case you'll be heartened to learn that the BBB has you...
SEC accuses Mark Cuban of insider trading
Mark Cuban, billionaire high-tech entrepreneur and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, is being accused of insider trading.
From the Wall Street Journal :
The Securities and Exchange Commission filed insider trading charges against Mark Cuban, the outspoken owner of the Dallas Mavericks, for allegedly dumping shares in Mamma.com upon learning it was raising money in a private offering. ...
Friendster users suffer weekend of woes
Friendster users suffer weekend of outage woes
Friendster has been anything but user-friendly since Thursday as the popular social networking site has experienced a total of 23 hours worth of outages over a series of incidents that have also caused alarm among 85 million users who have seen their friends lists disappear.
While there was another outage this morning, Friendster appears to...
Data center in old nuke bunker is the bomb
Here's an interesting data-center profile from the blog at Royal Pingdom , a Web monitoring company headquartered in Sweden:
This underground data center has greenhouses, waterfalls, German submarine engines, simulated daylight and can withstand a hit from a hydrogen bomb. It looks like the secret HQ of a James Bond villain.
Lots of fun pictures.
State of Washington sues Web/SEO firm
These are the kinds of charges that can send a company's customers fleeing ... and certainly should if they're proven to be true.
The State of Washington has filed suit (.pdf) against a Redmond-based search engine optimization and Web services outfit that has done business under the names Visible.net , Captures.com and WebMarketingSource.com. In essence, the state attorney general conten...
Valleywag history; Consumerist for sale
The gossip rag, Valleywag, will be missed by few , especially among those Silicon Valley stalwarts who have regularly been its targets.
The Consumerist, on the other hand, is well worth saving -- not that I have the scratch to save it. While they don't always hit every nail on the head, Ben Popken and his people swing a mean hammer at the corporate behemoths that make our lives miserabl...
Meet the new 'disruptive' Chinese economy
Robert Scoble -- formerly of Microsoft fame, now a video blogger for Fast Company -- files a written report from a factory floor in China:
The Chinese are now cutting out (the likes of) Amazon and are building Web sites that you can buy products from directly and they'll ship right to your door. ...
This is total ownership of everything. Total disruption of everyone who used to make mone...
No. 1 on iTunes (Bada-bing)
Personally, I hated this song when it was first released and was never much of a Journey fan (with all due respect to Steve Perry's amazing voice). However, with the final scene of the final episode of The Sopranos having permanently hard-wired the tune into my brain, I've come around enough to call it catchy.
I am not alone, apparently.
From the Guardian News Web site:
Californi...
'Synergy-related headcount reductions' and other euphemisms for 'you're fired'
Even the word layoff is a euphemism, when you think about it. Yes, it can serve to draw a distinction between budget-based and performance-based termination, but not many laid-off workers get recalled to their old jobs these days; "laid off" pretty much means you're fired.
And while certainly nothing new, the art of dodging plain English when it comes to describing mass firings continues to a...
'Synergy-related headcount restructuring' and other euphemisms for 'you're fired'
Even the word layoff is a euphemism, when you think about it. Yes, it can serve to draw a distinction between budget-based and performance-based termination, but not many laid-off workers get recalled to their old jobs these days; "laid off" pretty much means you're fired.
And while certainly nothing new, the art of dodging plain English when it comes to describing mass firings continues to a...
Obama's 'Net plans easier said than done
If you followed the presidential campaign at all you know that president-elect Barack Obama's real running mate was not Joe Biden but rather the Internet . Moreover, Obama is promising nothing less than a virtual open door into the previously opaque and impenetrable workings of Washington.
It's a grand vision. ... Good luck. Read more
Brits waste a week a year channel surfing?
That's the jaw-dropping data point gleaned from a survey commissioned by Microsoft's Connected TV Business and released this morning.
Microsoft, as might be expected, chooses to emphasize that its search technology can save TV viewers from wasting that week. Read more
