Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Tag: companies

  • DST vs IT

    Time Change a ‘Mini-Y2K’ in Tech Terms – New York Times: For the roughly 7,000 public companies in the United States, Mr. Hammond estimates the total cost of making computer fixes to deal with the daylight saving time shift at more than $350 million. “It’s causing a lot of corporate technology people sleepless nights,” he…

  • What About Mixed People?

    These companies use mitochondrial DNA to trace one’s genetic lineage. So, they take a sample from my mitochondria (which I got from my mom) and compare it to samples that have been taken from mitochondria samples found in their database to match it. Well, my mom’s mom has lots of English and Scottish ancestry. So…

  • Look for a Patent Wiki in 2007

    Patent review goes Wiki – August 21, 2006: That’s the basic concept behind a pilot program sponsored by IBM and other companies [including HP and Microsoft], which the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office appears poised to green-light. The project would apply an advisory version of the wiki approach to the patent-approval process. The issue is…

  • Great Job?

    BSA collects over $2M in settlements from U.S. companies: The Business Software Alliance (BSA), a watchdog group representing the nation’s leading software manufacturers, today announced it has collected over $2 million in settlements from 19 U.S. companies that were running illegal software. Compare that to this article from the BSA web site earlier this year:…

  • Crowdsourcing

    I am glad industries outside the computer-related realm are picking up what open source has known for a long time: Value can come from those who have not had to go through a job interview process to attach to a project. The power of the Internet is to facilitate communication. Wired 14.06: The Rise of…

  • Moz Outside Looking In

    Yeah, this one is a royal pain. Mozilla removes support for older versions of their browser six months after the new one went into production. Open source is nimble. Proprietary companies are inflexible. Sounds like its time to go after nimble applications? Why Mozilla still hasn’t cracked the enterprise | May 24, 2006 07:12 PM…

  • Apple 1 – Apple 1

    So selling music online does not violate a deal which “forbade Apple [Computer] from distributing music on physical media such as CDs or cassette tapes”. Wow… if only that has been a Supreme Court decision here in the US. That would have made the Napster case much more interesting. Sounds like Apple Corps should have…

  • BellSouth vs. Google – Round 1

    What about the customers? Companies all too often play chicken. It is the consumers who get screwed. A few years ago, a Sun vs. Microsoft disagreement meant no adequate Java Runtime Environment for the brand new Windows XP personal computers for months. Developers for online classes often tap Java for mini-applications (HTML editors, chat, file…

  • Nokia’s open source advantage

    The lesson here is that innovation doesn’t always mean starting from scratch. For Nokia, and Apple, open source isn’t an end in itself. It’s a beginning — one that allows these companies to concentrate on what they do best: delivering great products. Ask yourself whether your company is focused on doing the same. Are you…