Archive for September, 2005

First things first, congrats, yet again, Bill is the richest person in America. Forbes released their “Richest Americans” – here is the vitals on Mr. Gates’ wealth:

Net Worth: $51.0 billion
Source: Software, Microsoft – Self made
Age: 49
Marital Status: married, 3 children
Hometown: Medina, WA

On an interesting note, many of the richest people to date, made most of their money though leveraged buy outs (LBO’s). Ethical? Right? Their on the list.

On the flip side, Microsoft should really examine their marketing strategy. Over the summer, while driving to IBM, I would hear radio commercials advertising Windows XP…

A couple days later I learn that Microsoft started a large scale global advertising campaign promoting Windows XP.

Microsoft, take it from me, the world uses your OS – literally the world – everyone – start with a better product – or better yet, just tell me why Word must start in Safe Mode to work.

What Do I Want To Do Today? – Just start my computer, that’s it, just start and run.

MSN is starting to get creative with their ads. Might as well, 150 million people use MSN every month. But when I see ads like this – I can’t help but say “Why???”

Ok – if you see in the About Box, I have MSN 7.0 – why is it telling me to download it again?

Its not all bad with Microsoft. I’m sure if a Mac OS or Linux OS was used on almost every computer in the world, they’d have problems too. Executed independently, I’m sure Windows or any major OS would be just fine – start adding third part software, virus/worm threats, external hardware and some overall bad programming – what do you get? Global advertising campaigns telling the world your still the best choice.

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I first saw this. With Goolge Earth you can actually zoom in to Nestani, Greece. Were talking a town you can walk from one end to the other in 20 minutes.

I took some screen captures below and highlighted key parts. Nestani is 15 minutes from Tripoli and 1.5 hours from Athens.

Nothing better than Greek air.

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For a site that produces a small monetary return – it’s a great feeling to see all the different countries that come and use the service. The list bellow is the different countries that have come to WebBasedCron.com in August

1 US Commercial
2 Network (cron related)
3 United Kingdom
4 Unresolved/Unknown (most likely cron related)
5 Sweden
6 Australia
7 Denmark
8 Russian Federation
9 Canada
10 United States
11 Netherlands
12 Poland
13 France
14 Italy
15 US Educational
16 Belgium
17 Switzerland
18 Singapore
19 Old style Arpanet (arpa)
20 Saudi Arabia
21 Finland
22 Malaysia
23 Czech Republic
24 Romania
25 Germany
26 South Africa
27 Japan
28 Argentina
29 New Zealand (Aotearoa)
30 Austria

If your looking for an Exposé (Apple Mac OS X) type feel in Windows, give Konfabulator a try. A seriously amazing idea, the foot print is small, and it runs great. You can even use it on a Mac. Here is some info from their website:

Konfabulator is a JavaScript runtime engine for Windows and Mac OS X that lets you run little files called Widgets that can do pretty much whatever you want them to. Widgets can be alarm clocks, calculators, can tell you your WiFi signal strength, will fetch the latest stock quotes for your preferred symbols, and even give your current local weather.

Back on July 25th, Yahoo! Took it over, you can read the PR here.

The ‘Our History’ section of the Konfab website will tell you more about them.

CNet today had a news article talking about a special Google announcement coming Oct. 25-27 at Google’s Mountain View, Calif., headquarters.

Google is planning a partner forum for about 400 people, including bloggers and journalists from major media outlets, and is prohibiting participants from writing about it, according to a search engine industry expert.

One can only begin to imagine what they could announce – but I’ve heard a couple guesses at a Google Browser being announced? A while ago, Google was buying up a bunch of Dark Fiber — crazy Google voip?

But what doesn’t really make sense is the speakers:

Speakers on the agenda, Sullivan wrote, include Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, Yahoo Chief Executive Terry Semel, MSN Senior Vice President Yusuf Mehdi, InterActive Corp’s Chief Executive Barry Diller and Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble.

In an amazing, but almost expected turn of events, Microsoft is in talks with Time Warner to possibly take over AOL. Keep in mind, ICQ is part of AOL. Furthermore, a little while back Microsoft acquired a VOIP company.

Microsoft is aligning itself with Google, and in a sense working faster and stronger to maintain their position.

In a Sept. 14th article on CNet, Bill Gates said:

In fact (Google), they have this slogan that they are going to organize the world’s information. Our slogan is that we are going to give people tools to let them organize the world’s information. It’s a slightly different approach, based on the platform-ization of all of our capabilities and not thinking of ourselves as the organizer.

Bare in mind a couple days ago, eBay took over Skype. I wouldn’t be surprised if a partnership formed (in some fashion) with Google, Skype, or Yahoo!

We’ll see, Google Talk is good – but it’s very simple – they have to get better, fast.

Technorati and similar blog search engines seem to have a serious competitor now. Google released today their “Google Blog Search”. With Yahoo! and Google having their technologies so developed, is there any hope for vertical search engines like Technorati surviving?

I’ve spent a fair amount of time studying Nutch and Lucene, and it’s good to see an open source search engine in the works. But it’s only a matter of time, till all “major” vertical search engine topics will be covered by one of the big time search engine companies.

It’s been said before, (and Technorati has the idea) it’s not always about the product but the…

Its annoying that we live in a society were we praise people for changing their lives around. I was at a baptism yesterday, and I overheard my uncle and my father talking about a dentist back in Nestani, Greece. This dentist lets call him Jim, for the last 10-15 years was addicted to drugs.

I was fortunate at a young age, to go back to Greece frequently and one year that we were there, my sister began complaining about her teeth. Only knowing a single dentist from our home town, my dad made an appointment with Jim. Before we went and saw Jim, my dad spoke with some of his friends about my sister and the pain she was going through. Once my dads friends heard that we were going to Jim, their faces went cold, and told us to go there, make an excuse and get out of there.

Jim was crook, and since he was addicted to drugs, had to make as much money as possible to pay for his addiction. This meant taking out teeth of little kids, even if they didn’t need it. We went and saw Jim, and right away he said my sister needed to remove two teeth. Right after that, my dad made some excuse and we left. In the meantime, my dad’s friend made an appointment with another dentist that he knew, and we went and saw him right away. My sister needed a filling, 30 minutes later everything was fine.

So fast forward in the story, my dad is at the baptism talking to my uncle about Jim. Apparently Jim realized his wrongs, and is now punishing his body by fasting and becoming a monk. Oh how amazing, everyone was saying, that this man changed his life around, stopped taking drugs and is now becoming a monk.

Becoming a monk and fasting is no reason for my forgiveness. What about all the kids’ teeth he ripped out for no reason? So he caused pain and suffering to people for 15 years, and now he decides to go back to God and we need to praise him? The reality is that people somewhere in this world can’t eat properly, because this man removed teeth for no reason.

I know this is the wrong way to think about this, but if he wanted my forgiveness, then he should have all his teeth removed. Then he could understand the gravity of his crimes.

I told this to my mother, and she half agrees with me and says,

… remember when Jesus said, he who has no sin may cast the first stone…

This was in reference to the women who committed adultery and was subject to stoning by death. I responded by saying, the woman, by committing adultery was only hurting herself. Jim removed the teeth of children and adults for no reason. The woman disrespected herself, Jim caused pain and suffering to others.

This year I’m the President of the Greek Society at McMaster University. Using some basic marketing, we’re looking to re-define our image and attract as many new members as possible. Our name is in the process of changing from McMaster Hellenic Society to ΣΕΦ. Translated ΣΕΦ means “Group of Greek Friends”. Many more cool things are on the way..

I just finished getting up the new website. We’re going for a “blogging” style, so that members can come and see all the news at any point in time. The new site really fits our new image, take a look.

Over the past couple years Bell Labs has divested much of its core research. I’m not sure why, but one explanation could be Lucent’s stock performance over the past 5 years.

I’ve never been too interested in quantum computing, but last month Technology Review had a great article on emerging technologies, and one of them was quantum. The article was especially useful since it outlined not only the basics, but the status of the research now, and were it’s expected to be in the future.

One of the companies leading the charge for quantum is Lucent’s Bell Labs. Even though the technology is still a decade away from solving serious problems, Lucent believes in a payback through the development of secondary technologies.

Part of its motivation is the belief that the hardware research may pay off for Lucent long before quantum computers arrive, yielding advances in areas such as miniaturized lasers and optical components.

As the article says, for the general public quantum computing doesn’t have many applications. But for research and science, quantum computing could one day be used to solve certain problems millions of times faster than conventional computers.

This happened a while ago, but it’s hilarious. An employee of Microsoft quits, goes to Google, and then a couple weeks later is fired by Google. Why was he fired? For blogging and advertising on Google – Here is a timeline of his Google career, as seen on SearchEngineWatch:

• January 17: He posts about starting work at Google.
• January 25: He gains attention after Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscope blogs about Jen’s blog and some critical remarks about Google on it. The blog posts disappear soon after.
• January 26: The blog returns, along with Jen’s explanation of why he pulls some of his material down.
• January 31: The blog gains attention again, after ads for it are spotted on Google.

You can’t do stuff like that. I imagine he felt like some super hero going to work for Google, ditching Microsoft. But you can’t parade stuff like that publicly. Google has a market capitalization of 80.55B, do you think they want a kid making posts like this?

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is definitely a passionate man. No matter what company he’s leading, he’s willing to fight to the bitter end, and is no stranger to battles. Before heading Microsoft he was an exec at Sun Microsystems and Novell, which both fought and swallowed up other companies.

Numerous Microsoft employees over the last couple years have defected to Google, so it was no surprise to a read in an article at FairFax and a post on Slashdot:

At some point in the conversation, Mr. Ballmer said: ‘Just tell me it’s not Google,” Lucovosky said in his statement. Lucovosky replied that he was joining Google. ‘At that point, Mr. Ballmer picked up a chair and threw it across the room hitting a table in his office,’ Lucovosky recounted, adding that Ballmer then launched into a tirade about Google CEO Eric Schmidt. ‘I’m going to f***ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I’m going to f***ing kill Google.’

The article had Mr. Ballmer’s response saying:

“…gross exaggeration. Mark’s decision to leave was disappointing and I urged him strongly to change his mind. But his characterization of that meeting is not accurate.”

It may sound a bit heated, but in the end, its good business. It forces companies to be more creative, make better products and hopefully the best will survive.

I personally believe the open source move is a great idea, but seriously though, people have to choose their battles wisely. It’s important not to get caught up in the hype and love of free software.

Microsoft has come this far on the average person. People love simplicity, reoccurring themes and ease of use. When dealing with Microsoft Word, you know that if you write your Master’s Thesis in a DOC format, and then send it to Kinkos to print, its going to print exactly the same as it would on your home printer. Can the same be said if you used Word and Kinkos used OpenOffice? What if your Word file had complicated macro’s for TOC, heading, figures, footnotes, etc.?

So I was surprised when I read the Forbes article saying:

The state of Massachusetts is proposing to make all its workers stop using Microsoft’s Word, Excel and other desktop software applications and switch to open source software…

My immediate reaction was: Good luck with that, it would be nice, but I don’t see it surviving. It’s another example of people getting caught up in the hype of open source and it application to the average person.