bob frankston

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Frankston: Who's pirating bandwidth these days? You or AT&T (and peers)

Bob Frankston (co-inventor of the electronic spreadsheet) has been tirelessly spending the last few years trying to shed light on the fact that there's plenty of network capacity out there and that anybody particularly the carriers and ISPs that tell you something different are full of it. They're just reserving...

Tags: Bandwidth, AT&T Corp., Piracy, Bob Frankston, David Berlind

Blog posts 2007-09-07

Bob Frankston: No more monkeys jumping on the bed

Bob Frankston, the guy who co-invented the electronic spreadsheet and who spearheaded Microsofts original home network strategies, routinely rants about allowing intelligence into the middle of the Internet. To paraphrase his many essays, "things were working fine when nodes could just talk to each other without a monkey in the...

Tags: monkey, Internet

Blog posts 2006-10-20

Death by deregulation

In David Berlind's latest Alice in Wonderland trip through the American telecommunications universe -- "Are Baby Bells abusing gov't granted right-of-way?" -- he credits Bob Frankston, the co-inventor of the VisiCalc electronic spreadsheet, for inspiring this tour-de-force of imaginative fact development. Mr. Frankston's VisiCalc allowed the computer owner to invent...

Tags: natural gas, telecommunications

Blog posts 2005-08-23

Are baby bells abusing their gov't granted right-of-way?

Look outside your window or check the manhole cover down the street. Not just anyone can hang a wire on that pole or drag one underground -- a wire that eventually connects to your house. The electric company can. The cable TV company can. And...

Tags: Baby Bell

Blog posts 2005-08-16

Fishy e-mail reeks of phishing, or something worse

Bob Frankston has encapsulated a very suspicious e-mail that he received or thinks he received from Bank of America in a longer expression to Dave Farber's List of his worries and concerns that his private communications with the financial institution were seriously breached. Being the technical guy that...

Tags: Bob Frankston

Blog posts 2005-06-22

Frankston's Threadlogs (#1): Enter walled garden here

OK, here's something new for Between the Lines. I'm calling it ZDNet's "threadlogs." Or maybe it should be called IMlogs. They're my private IM conversations with various industry movers and shakers. Why am I doing this? I'd rather you see the raw exchanges than my...

Tags: orifice, carrier, telephone

Blog posts 2005-05-26

Bluetooth may not be able to handle EV-DO (3G) nets

When Bob Frankston isn't busy figuring out how to fix the Internet (he loves to tell you what's wrong with it), he's tinkering with bleeding edge technologies, often to see how well they interoperate. Two wireless technologies Frankston has been playing around with are EV-DO and Bluetooth. Frankston has...

Tags: Bob Frankston, Bluetooth, EVDO

Blog posts 2005-04-11

Additional Resources

News to know: Apple, Crapware; Icahn and Yahoo; Brocade

Notable headlines: Larry Dignan: Apple's Mac shipments surge; Lowballs on outlook; Jobs health worries Adrian Kingsley-Hughes: Apple reports record Q3 08 Does Apple need to announce a post Steve Jobs plan? Dennis Howlett: Apple chaos theory Jason O'Grady: Apple Q3 2008...

Tags: Apple iPhone, Sony Corp., Facebook, Larry Dignan, Yahoo! Inc., Brocade Communications Systems Inc., Apple Inc., Mice, Utility Computing, 3G, Open Source, Hardware, Peripherals, Cellular Phones, Consumer Electronics, Personal Technology

Blog posts 2008-07-22

(Dinosaur Sighting: Microsoft Bob)

(Dinosaur Sighting: Microsoft Bob)Idea for video gameI have sometimes envisioned a video game which would be a first person shooter, and the targets would be the various office assistants. Lots and lots of blood, too.

Tags: Games, Corporate communications, Dinosaur Sighting, Microsoft Bob, Microsoft Corp.

Discussion threads 2008-07-21

SteelEye Protection Suite for Citrix XenServer

Bob Williamson, VP of Business Development for Steeleye, and I played a rousing game of telephone tag and meeting shuffle before finding a time that would work for a discussion of Steeleye's SteelEye Protection Suite. I was traveling making the task even more complex that it usually is. Since I've...

Tags: Clustering, Citrix Systems Inc., Virtual Machine, SteelEye Protection Suite, Citrix XenServer, Disaster Recovery Protection, Desktop Virtualization, Dan Kusnetzky

Blog posts 2008-07-21

News to know: Amazon S3 outage; iPhone 3G; SOA debugging; Microsoft

Notable headlines: Michael Krigsman: Amazon S3: 'Elevated error rates'. Techmeme GigaOm: S3 Outage Highlights Fragility of Web Services Dana Blankenhorn: Do open source applications take security seriously? Dancho Danchev: Spam coming from free email providers increasing ...

Tags: Apple iPhone, S3 Inc., Larry Dignan, Apple Inc., SOA, Amazon.com Inc., Apple iPhone 3G, Microsoft Corp., Outage, 3G, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Sales Strategy, Open Source, Cellular Phones, Consumer Electronics, Personal Technology, Web Services, Enterprise Software, Software, Sales

Blog posts 2008-07-21

Top states with IPTV interest: Hawaii, New Jersey, North Dakota

Top states with IPTV interest: Hawaii, New Jersey, North Dakotapeoples are live in dakota...thats goodI live in New York. but I am originally from North Dakota and I am agreed with your comments. You have good information of this place. North Dakota is a evergreen state .there is a good...

Tags: TVs, TV & Home Theater, IP television

Discussion threads 2008-07-21

AMD CEO Ruiz out; Can Meyer turn it around?

Updated: AMD CEO Hector Ruiz has stepped down and the chipmaker has named chief operating officer Dirk Meyer as its new leader. The news comes amid the latest financial miss for AMD--a second quarter loss that missed estimates by a wide margin. Meyer's job: Restore credibility. According...

Tags: Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Meyer, Product Momentum, Asset Management, Research & Development, Processors, Operational Planning, Business Operations, Semiconductors, Hardware, Components, Larry Dignan

Blog posts 2008-07-17

Are solar-energy materials in short supply?

At the Intersolar and Greentech Media conferences, J. Michael Horowitz of the Stanford Group moderates a discussion on solar-thermal technologies and the challenges solar-energy companies face when acquiring materials. Panelists include Bob Cart of GreenVolts, Andrew McMahan of SkyFuel, Robert Morgan of Ausra, Suvi Sharma of Solaria, and...

Tags: Material, Solar

Videos 2008-07-17

Torvalds attacks IT industry 'security circus'

The Linux creator has some harsh words for creators of the OpenBSD operating system, as part of a wider critique of what he sees as self-centered behavior in the IT security industry Linux creator Linus Thorvalds has labeled makers of the OpenBSD operating system a "bunch of masturbating monkeys",...

Tags: Information Technology, Industry, OpenBSD, Bug, Attack, Linux Creator, Torvalds, UNIX, Operating Systems, Open Source, Linux, Security, Software, Linus Torvalds, Linux kernel, Liam Tung, ZDNet Australia

News items 2008-07-17

Seven SOA experts explain how to 'just do it'

Seven SOA experts explain how to 'just do it'Refreshing Collaboration, No Hype!The great thing about this book is that the various authors focus 100% on SOA's practical implementation issues and 0% promoting their various SOA offerings.And by having different experts cover each aspect, the reader gets best of breed advice...

Tags: Service-oriented architecture (SOA), Web services, Middleware, SOA

Discussion threads 2008-07-16

Evaluating the cost of solar

J. Michael Horowitz of the Stanford Group moderates a discussion on ‘green‘ finance and operational and maintenance costs associated with new solar projects at the Intersolar Conference 2008 and Greentech Media conference. Panel guests include Bob Cart of GreenVolts, Robert Morgan of Ausra, Suvi Sharma of Solaria, and John...

Tags: Cost, Conference, Financial Accounting, Finance, Solar

Videos 2008-07-16

Bob the Builder - Can Do Zoo (exe)

Bob the Builder and his machine team are ready to tackle any project. As they hammer out solutions that lead to a job well done, Bob and the Can-Do Crew demonstrate the power of positive thinking, problem solving, team work and follow through. This version is the first release on...

Tags: Team, Brighter Minds Media, Team Management, Management

Software downloads 2008-07-16

Hammering at cost with open source

Irregular Bob Warfield riffs on Salesforce.com's decision to ditch Sun/Solaris in favor of Dell/Linux. In doing so, Bob makes the point that: ...for a SaaS company, the cost of service delivery is an absolutely critical factor.  Once you have software that runs well and scales horizontally on cheap commodity...

Tags: Software, Salesforce.com Inc., Software-as-a-service, Oracle Corp., Open Source, Vinnie Mirchandani, Software As A Service (SaaS), Cloud Computing, Sales Force Management, Emerging Technologies, Sales, Dennis Howlett

Blog posts 2008-07-15

Last.fm app debuts on iPhone and iPod touch (video)

On the opening day of the App Store, a number of competing music streaming applications were available, including major brands AOL Radio and Virgin, along with a favorite of mine, Pandora. However, one notable admission on day one was the music social network and ad-supported streaming music service, Last.fm. That...

Tags: Apple iPhone, Apple iPod, Video, Apple iPod Touch, Music, Digital Music, Digital Media, Personal Technology, Consumer Electronics, Steve O\'Hear

Blog posts 2008-07-14