By ashvil on 9/8/2001 3:28 PM

Instant messaging, once a novelty, is set to take centre stage in the way many of us communicate both at home and in the work place.

By ashvil on 8/19/2001 7:49 PM

> And while competitors like Ask Jeeves, GoTo.com, Inktomi, LookSmart and Yahoo!, allow paid listings - in which customers pay for their sites to be included in a search provider\'s directory or index - and paid placements - in which sites are guaranteed the top spots in searches that contain specific keywords - Google does not require companies to pay to get on its index. In fact it does not allow it.

The Google clean interface is one the most important reason that they won. Ofcourse, they still have to deliver the right results to the search. One of the cute things that Google does it that it modifies it logo on the main page to suit the day. For example on 4th of July they had fireworks around their logo.

By ashvil on 8/6/2001 5:51 AM

Posted by ashvil on Tuesday, August 07, 2001 - 2:30:00 PM
We need to study history behind the PC and learn from it. At that time MS Basic was the standard in microcomputers, so IBM came to MS for a version of Basic that was placed in the original IBM PC ROM.

During those discussions, Bill found out that they did not have a OS and suggested CP/M. But found out that IBM has already talked with CP/M guys and did not like them. So he suggested that MS could develop an OS for them. He actually got a verbal commitment from IBM before he brought DOS from Seattle Computer company for $50K. Tim Patterson was the guy in Seattle Computer company who wrote the first version of DOS.

Softalk - The Roots of DOS, March, 1983.
http://www.patersontech.com/Dos/Softalk/Softalk.html

Tim Patterson\'s web page
http://www.patersontech.com/Dos/

Thoughts on the 20th Anniversary of the IBM PC
http://www.bricklin.com/ibmpc20thoughts.htm

By ashvil on 7/22/2001 12:27 PM

Keld Hansen presents a simple JSP-architecture, along with a handful of useful techniques, for the quick creation of web-applications - without loss of quality.

By ashvil on 7/2/2001 3:53 PM

In March of 1982, conservative theorists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling published an article in the Atlantic Monthly introducing a new crime fighting theory known as broken windows. The theory states: if the first broken window in a building is not repaired, then people who like breaking windows will assume that no one cares about the building and more windows will be broken. Soon the building will have no windows....

This is not one of so called theoretical theories. Nowhere has broken windows become more prominent than in New York City. Upon his election in 1994, Mayor Rudolph Guiliani instituted sweeping changes in his police department adopting a zero tolerance approach stressed by broken windows. Guiliani ordered his police to enforce even the lowest level offenses including jaywalking, vagrancy and public intoxication. Coinciding with these policies was a dramatic drop in overall crime, particularly serious crime.

I saw this difference between 1994 and 1997. In two years New York was transformed from a place where people were scared to go out in the night to a sight where families used to take their kids in strollers for night outings.

Anyway, the main reason for posting this article is there are too many of these small broken windows in the software industry and I want to make sure there are addressed now, rather then later The two important ones are communication and sense of group responsibility.

We need to work very hard on communication. I have seen a lot of time being wasted due to poor communication.

The other thing is a sense of group responsibility. We need to believe that we work as a team. It does not matter if my work is done, if the end result is that if the software does not ship, for whatever reason, all of us suffer. We need to move away from \"my work\" and to TEAMWORK and get away from \"it was not by job\" to do that.

By ashvil on 6/18/2001 2:53 PM

>A gaggle of computing giants will release Monday a new version of a key Web standard, the UDDI directory, that provides some common ground on how competitors such as Microsoft, IBM and Sun Microsystems view the future of the Internet.

By ashvil on 6/12/2001 7:54 PM

>That\'s the premise behind shareware, a concept that dates to the early days of personal computers. Essentially, creators of shareware ask users to pay for their software if they try it and find it useful. Some use a bit of coercion, building time limits into their programs or requiring payment for access to some features. Games and utilities are the biggest shareware hits, but complete sets of business applications are also sold this way. As the name implies, shareware developers are happy to have people share their products, because they can ultimately benefit when the software is copied far and wide.

By ashvil on 6/7/2001 7:55 PM

>With the bursting of the high-tech bubble, the prevailing social mood is shifting from Internet worship to cynicism. The attitude that \"the Internet changes everything\" has given way in some quarters to denigration of the Net as a fad, the citizen\'s band radio of the 1990s. Yet just as the early tone was overoptimistic, the new one could easily become unjustifiably pessimistic. To avoid overreactions, it might be useful to analyze what propelled the dot-com craze to the ridiculous heights it reached in 1999 and early 2000

By ashvil on 5/28/2001 7:56 PM

Jon Udell talks about using weblogs as Project management tools.

By ashvil on 5/24/2001 10:22 PM

Antarcti.ca\'s Visual Net  software transforms networks into places; data into virtual maps. Visual Net creates maps of networks to help users visualize data and find what they\'re looking for.