How can an ordinary customer judge a company, particularly its commitment to quality and good products? That's a very difficult undertaking, and analysts spend a lot of time and earn a lot of money for this, some of it probably undeserved.

However, there is an easy substitute for judging an entire company—judge only its web site. Everybody can do that, it doesn't take very much time, it can even be entertaining and fun.

Telly

Telly is a computer program that finds real words for telephone numbers that can be typed into a phone instead of the number and that may be easier to remember. It currently covers two languages—English and German. Try it, you may like it.

These are a few thoughts from the point of view of a hobby economist and friend of old cars. (I have a 1970 Jaguar E. :-)

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[Article has been relocated.]

I just received an email bounce with an error message saying:

Error 554 – Message could not be sent due to inappropriate content

It was an important email. I had worked into the night to prepare some source code from a programmer in Nigeria for somebody else to work on. I was not amused to be told that my email was "inappropriate".

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ACM Turing Lecture 1972

The Humble Programmer
by Edsger W. Dijkstra

Excerpts:

As a result of a long sequence of coincidences I entered the programming profession officially on the first spring morning of 1952 and as far as I have been able to trace, I was the first Dutchman to do so in my country. In retrospect the most amazing thing was the slowness with which, at least in my part of the world, the programming profession emerged, a slowness which is now hard to believe. ...

Blogger Robert Scoble, former Microsoft MVP, then Microsoft employee, ran a screen-scraping script to lift 5,000 names, email addresses, and birthdates off Facebook. They noticed and banned him for breach of their terms of use. Read his blog.

After an outcry of many bloggers, Facebook reinstated his account.

A web site converts bitmap images to vector art – it's an online auto-tracer. Just upload your image and we will vectorize it for you.

Vector art is useful because it allows you to scale an image without making it blurry or pixelated.

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The German company G DATA dove into the cybercrime scene and uncovered a few interesting tidbits.

[To the English version of this article]

Einführung

Dieser Artikel stellt interaktive Websites und ihre Technologie vor, die von manchen Marketing-Aktivisten auch "Web 2.0" genannt wird.

Die neue Fähigkeit ist, dass sowohl Sie als auch Web-Besucher sofort durch den Web-Browser in die Website hineinschreiben können, ohne dass sie besondere Web-Editor-Software verwenden müssen.

[Zur deutschen Version dieses Artikels]

Introduction

This article introduces interactive web sites and their technology, also sometimes called "Web 2.0" by marketing people.

The new capability is that both you and the web site visitors can instantly write into the web site through the web browser, without having to use special web editing software.