Category: Web/Tech

Looking at Time Warner’s financial results from yesterday, it’s amazing how quickly AOL has turned into a major drag on the company. The basic problem is technology — dial-up subscribers are disappearing and AOL is failing to capture enough paid broadband subscribers to replace them. After all, who wants to pay a cable or DSL broadband provide and then pay an additional amount to AOL for a “bring your own access” account? Morgan Stanley forecasts AOL will continue to ooze subscribers this year — losing close to another 2 million of them.

Dan Gillmor comments about Wikipedia and wiki’s in general.

Successful Wikis are inherently fragile, says Cunningham, but they show something important: “People are generally good.”

Wikipedia is a great experiment and a wonderful resource. If you’ve not tried it, check it out. I recently edited a couple of entries related to card payments. Search for and read subjects you know something about — and update or edit what’s there to make it even better. As Ward Cunningham says, people are generally good and want to help.

San Francisco Chronicle writer Benny Evangelista reviews twenty years of Macintosh. Meanwhile, Business Week, in this week’s cover story, examines Apple’s current prospects.

TJ posts on Riverbed and the network performance enhancement they deliver. Just raised $10 MM in a Series B financing. FineGround has been doing this for years — but not using an appliance model.

I had to chuckle when I finished reading the article titled Managing Worms and Internal Security Threats” posted by Chris McNab on the O’Reilly Weblogs site. He says:

This type of network is infintely more resilient to worm attack, as the total number of Windows servers / workstations to patch is significantly reduced, and incidents, if they do occur, are easily contained and managed in line with a strong incident response plan.

I think we’ll be seeing a lot more simplicity within internal networks like this, in the name of security and protection from worms.

My chuckle is the result of getting to be too old. The kind of network advocated by Chris is essentially the old IBM 3270 green screen environment of the 1970’s.

What goes around, comes around! We live to repeat it.

Peter Merholz has a great post about the design of US National Park brochures.

The new issue of the Economic Letter from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco arrived today: Is There a Digital Divide?.

The “digital divide” in the U.S. is based on differential computer use across education, income, and race/ethnicity groups. In the extreme, a Hispanic individual with a high school degree or less and family income less than $15,000 per year has only a 30.6% chance of using a computer (at home, work, or school), compared to a 93.8% chance for a white person with a graduate degree and family income over $75,000 per year.

Accounting for the independent effects of these and other factors indicates that college education is the key determinant of computer use, although substantial gaps are evident across income categories and, to a lesser extent, racial/ethnic groups as well.

Moreover, additional tabulations with 1997 data (not displayed) indicate that, in percentage point differences, these gaps have been relatively stable over time (although they are likely to shrink as computer prices fall further and usage rates for some groups approach the limit of 100%)

A good article from Sunday’s Dallas Morning-News (free registration required) on Wal-Mart’s RFID initiative.

An early proponent was Wal-Mart vice chairman Tom Coughlin, who had read Intel Corp. co-founder Andy Grove’s book Only the Paranoid Survive and felt that RFID would be what the author described as a “strategic inflection point” – a change that ultimately separates successful companies from failures.

Under late founder Sam Walton’s direction, Wal-Mart rose to power by developing some of the most sophisticated inventory-tracking technology in the retail industry. The retailer drove prices down, in part, by knowing more about what it owned than competitors did. To Ms. Dillman, RFID is just part of that tradition. “Some company cultures don’t allow people to experiment,” she said. “We’re not afraid to test things.”

Directions on Microsoft posts their list of challenges for Microsoft in 2004.