With all the hype about Google these days, it is interesting to hear a conterpoint to thier ultimate dominance. Robert Cringley writes an facinating article about the fact that Google may be peaking. Here is a quote

What the heck Google is up to is a favorite topic of conversation this week in high tech circles. What's driving this is a combination of things including the new Google Toolbar, Gtalk, but most especially the company's announcement that it will shortly sell another $4 billion in shares. What does Google plan to do with all that money, people are wondering?

Nothing at all.

And he goes on:

What Google WILL do is roll-out incremental products at a blinding pace. Not long ago, PayPal co-founder Max Levchin explained to me that rapid development is an important key to market dominance.

"What you want to do," he said, "is listen to your customers and bring out every two weeks improved versions that would each take your competitor two months to complete. That's when you are on a rocket -- they can't keep up so they can't compete. They lose hope and pretty soon you have the market pretty much to yourself."

That pace of technical development, which probably isn't sustainable for long at any company, isn't POSSIBLE at all at more mature companies like AOL, Yahoo, and especially Microsoft. That adolescent energy is the mojo that makes a startup scarier to Bill Gates than a mature competitor. He knows that if Microsoft ever takes a big dive, it will be because of a Google, not a Yahoo, and certainly not an AOL.

You can read it HERE.

I recently was working on a project where I needed to upload a file to a webserver. I got it all working but did not know (at least not right away) that the webserver actually collects the file in memory before writing it to disk. So, when I uploaded a 1G file, guess how much memory I used? In any case MS talks about a way to deal with downloading a file to avoid this problem here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/812406/EN-US/

Just got back from Americas Conference on Information Systems. It was pretty good. My networking skills was a little lacking. I think I did more networking on the flight home than at the conference. In any case it was interesting. Lots of good talks. The demographics of the conference was interesting. (I often count races at things like these). Roughly speaking it was probably:
40% Caucasian
35% Asian
20% Indian/Mideastern
2% African American
1% Hispanic
2% Other

I am working on a research project that will include some text to speech and (once again) Microsoft has come to my aid with some managed code.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/coding4fun/inthebox/TTS-HW/default.aspx

Spent the summer working on research projects. Just really burned out now. I have been writing a paper on wavelet-based decision support. This is some work I did last novemeber, not very exciting stuff anymore. Just really want to finish it. Getting closer though. I think I need to take a break.