Year: 2002

ACLU Launches TIPS Watch Web Site, ACLU – “The ACLU needs your help today to defeat this massive invasion of personal privacy before it can take root!” In a related article, see “A Site to Despise Untrained Spies,” http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0%2C1283%2C54492%2C00.html. [LLRX Newstand]Anyone who is interested in my post a few weeks back about Ashcroft’s Operation TIPS…

Network World Article on Blogging. I was interviewed for this article on blogging and using it in large organizations a few weeks ago.  Most of the interest was generated by my offer to pay for blogging software for the first 100 State IT workers to start one.  [Windley’s Enterprise Computing Weblog]

After experiencing some frustration with the time it takes pages to load on this site (for those who are interested, it seems to primarily be a function of the complex nested tables that make up the underlying HTML), I’m going to try to learn enough CSS to redo this site without using tables. Any suggestions…

Prof. Manindra Agarwal and two of his students, Nitin Saxena and Neeraj Kayal (both BTech from CSE/IITK who have just joined as Ph.D. students), have discovered a polynomial time deterministic algorithm to test if an input number is prime or not. Lots of people over (literally!) centuries have been looking for a polynomial time test…

What comes to mind when I mention these names? William Buckley, Dan Quayle, Ken Starr, and Tom Delay. Did you say cruise? I thought so! Click if you dare…

Great article from Strategy + Business, Booz Allen’s in-house publication: CEO vs. CIO: Can This Marriage Be Saved? It focuses on the unfortunate tension between many CEOs and their CIOs. Some relevant quotes: The problem is that most CEOs are interested in technology only to the extent that it adds value to the organization. To them,…

Give them credit for trying: Optimize Magazine, a new title in the InformationWeek empire, has launched “The Business Blog“. Unfortunately it looks like they’re updating weekly, and not exactly in the easiest format to make it useful. (Another minor nit, though it’s too early to tell: the URL appears to point to issue-specific entries, which…

A great catch by Phil Wolff about the social characteristics of web logs: Blogging Alone. Stephen Dulaney applies Indicators of Social Capital to Web Logs. Levels of giving (blog ecossystem) reflects people’s propensity to give to others when they themselves may not directly benefit. The economy of giving links. Participation and engagement (What we do when…

Terahertz lasersLasers now work at new wavelengthsAug 8th 2002 [Economist.com: Science & Technology] Enough progress on this front will dramatically expand the market for wireless communications. Lots of hurdles though – not least of which is getting the lasers to be stable at room temperature. But breakthroughs in medical imaging are almost certain to follow,…

And, as I opined last year, I am skeptical that funding ( from VCs, Microsoft, or anyone else) is a key limiting factor influencing the amount of software innovation. Right up until 1994 or so, VC funding for software was nearly impossible to get. It was in this austere environment that TCP/ IP, SMTP, NNTP,…