Twitter

Suddenly there is a lot of talk about twitter ...not because it became so famous and so huge in a short amount of time...but because there were rumors that Google might buy Twitter..

It is a great injustice to a small and vibrant company...that it gets plucked up by a behemoth and then left to fend for itself among several other projects inside google. It is also bad that it gets evaluated even before it decides on a business model.

Currently Twitter has no business model and has about 30+ employees. It is running up losses and currently surviving with the investments from venture capitalist. I would definitely like to see it grow and make some money and create a distinct identity for itself....it definitely has one among the techies who frequently use their mobile to access internet...but needs lot more support to become successful..

So will anyone pay for using twitter..or will anyone pay for the advertisement..

Tax

Taxation is a unrelated topic in a technology blog..but the recent discussions in the state of MN on taxing internet downloads and internet purchases has triggered a serious debate on the topic in the technology circles.

Currently any internet download and most of the internet purchases are not taxed in Minnesota and several other states. It is getting taxed in around 10 states as of today. The taxing will make sure that internet retailers will be treated on par with the Brick & Mortar shops and this will lead them to gain a bit on their internet rivals.

I don't know whether this is good or not...There are pros and cons..
pros...
more revenue for government
Brick & Mortar stores can perform better..

cons..
It reduces the effectiveness of the internet companies..
the internet downloads have lesser carbon footprints and taxation will affect one of the greenest businesses...

what do you think?

Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems was always close to my heart. This was one of the companies I dreamt of working when I was in my first company. Slowly the dream weaned away as I realized how badly the company was doing back in 2001 timeframe.

I heard about SUN as the makers of java and though currently it is their SOLARIS servers which are making money still think of it as creators of Java.

Today IBM called of the talk on SUn purchase ..and for all you might know the deal could still happen. IBM should be better fit for SUN than any other company out their and vice versa. IBM also has also open source to some degree..though it is not as much as Sun. Ultimately it is tough to predict what might happen to SUN if the merger goes through.

I still hope all is well with SUN and it comes out sccessful and stays a strong company with or without IBM.

Good Luck SUN...

Advertisements

It is interesting to see how the advertisements have evolved over the years and how it is changing so fast nowadays.
Just today I heard on the Radio as to how Internet advertising is useless. The logic being very few people believe what companies says about products or services in Internet. They would rather believe a testimony or a review from a friend or a even another user. You can gather plenty of that information in the internet and which in turn makes the advertisements rather worthless.

Advertising in it's paid form started with the newspapers and progressed along to the TV, Films and Digital media. Slowly people are able to ignore advertisements pretty easily. Few years back people were forced to watch all the TV ads. Once they had a remote and a bunch of channels they started moving away to different options during the advertisements. Then came the death knell TIVOs and DVRs where they started watching the content by skipping through the ads quickly.

One interesting idea I heard to overcome this was a Ad created specially for the TIVOs or DVRs where it was designed to show the content only if you watch that in slow motion. It was a interesting concept but not sure what product was advertised like that and whether it was successful..

So where will we go...I guess product placements will become more popular and they will try to integrate Ads along with the content we want to see...like the MINI Coopers of "Brazilian Job"
We might also see Ads rolling over the screen when the actual program happens as that makes people see the content....what else do you htink might happen?

By the way though internet advertising is of little use for the sponsors...it might be useful for me...

Blackberry AppStore

Today BlackBerry announced it's own Application Store...similar to the Iphone Appstore.

Apple took the business to the next logical area by opening up it's software and letting users decide what they want. This essentially created a huge company where Millions worked for Apple for free or rather waited for their payment if they are successful. This I think is just an idea borne out of the opensource mania sweeping the techworld. Apple proved that it is the way to go and you will be amazed by the range of applications available. I really was surprised by the "A Free Level" application as it was pretty simple and innovative.

Now all the others have started following hte tail and Google already has it's Appstore. Research in Motion (maker of Blackberry) announced it's App store or as they call it App World was released today. I heard Microsoft and Nokia will be following suite.
Of these ones I guess Nokia's should be the interesting one as they will have the highest number of devices out there to run the Apps on.

We will have to wait and see as to how these pan out...interesting is n't it...


Here is a link for Blackberry Application Site

Google Pranks

Google has a big tradition of launching some pranks on April Fools day. I am not sure if there is a department in google to do just this and think up a spam for each year.

Google should have spent a fortune...(Fortune atleast for us the less fortunate ones) to host the links and introduce that in it's pages and more so think and come up with the pranks. I initially thought that this is all a big waste of money and resources. But coming to think of it..I can't help it that the first thing I did after I switched on my computer is to check the Google and Gmail pages to see what they have come up with this year. I guess if they fail to do this for a year now millions of techies around the world would be disappointed...

here are the few pranks that come to my mind ..
The toilet pranks that came last year(2008)
The paper emails before that...

Interestingly enough Google released GMAIL with 1GB storage on April 1st. May that was part of a hoax and since it evoked too much interest google went ahead and created the project :-) Just may be...what do you think...?


For a complete list of pranks visit the below link.
Google Pranks

Beware of the Bad Anti Virus Software

There are several softwares in the internet which will claim to find virus in your computers and will attempt to clean it out. Though most of this spam Anti Virus software will not do any harm...sometimes it makes you pay though it does not do any job.

Easy way to stay clear:
The most easy way to stay clear is to stick with the few industry leading anti-virus softwares. Here is a partial list of some the well know rogue Anti-Virus softwares

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_software#Partial_list_of_rogue_software

SQL Server Search with Dates

Here is a bit on one interesting issue that I faced recently during the search in a SQL server table for dates. Though this was encountered in Microsoft SQL Server the behavior is the same in other relational databases also.

Here is the scenario...I had few records that were similiar to the one given below in the table named FOO

FOO.Date
2008-07-23 12:28:36.963
2008-07-23 12:32:17.467
2008-07-23 12:34:23.130
2008-07-23 12:35:02.587

I ran the following query and expected the result to include all the records given above.
Select * from Foo where date <= '2008-07-23'

Since I had the = along with the less than I figured that will be a match but the results were empty. After thinking for about 10 seconds I realised where I was going wrong. The SQL Server when I dont give a time value assumes the time to be Midnight or the start of the day. So essentially my query is equal to this.
Select * from Foo where date <= '2008-07-23 00:00:00.000'

Since the user input did not have the time component the query input did not have and that created this issue.

Resolution:
A simple resolutions I figured will be to add the time to the query and make it the end of the day. I initiall thought of hardcoding the time to something like 23:59:59.999 but figured that might be a litttle crude. So I just added a java method to get me the end of the day. Here is the method. Please comment on this and let me know if you can think of a better solution.

public Date getEndOfDayDate() {
Calendar newCalendar = Calendar.getInstance();
newCalendar.set(Calendar.DATE, this.getDay());
newCalendar.set(Calendar.MONTH, this.getMonth());
newCalendar.set(Calendar.YEAR, this.getYear());
newCalendar.set(Calendar.HOUR_OF_DAY, newCalendar.getMaximum(Calendar.HOUR_OF_DAY));
newCalendar.set(Calendar.MINUTE, newCalendar.getMaximum(Calendar.MINUTE));
newCalendar.set(Calendar.SECOND, newCalendar.getMaximum(Calendar.SECOND));
newCalendar.set(Calendar.MILLISECOND, newCalendar.getMaximum(Calendar.MILLISECOND));

return new Date(newCalendar);

}