Stiennon

If you have been immersed in real life lately you may not have twigged to Twitter, the micro-blogging site that has recently hit critical mass. By my measure whenever a new internet phenomenon is noticed by the Wall Street Journal it is about six months until it gets purchased for an astronomical sum. My bet would be on Google acquiring Twitter before the end of the year.

Think back for a moment to the early days of the Internet when domain name registrations were free. Imagine how rich you would be if you had thought to reserve "internet.com", "business.com", or any two or three letter domain name for that matter.   Domain name investment is a mature industry now with every word in the English dictionary long since reserved by some entrepreneur/squatter. Remember my story of Renata McGriff? Back when Citibank announced their mega-merger with Travelers she noticed that they neglected to grab their new domain name: citigroup.com. Within three days Renata was richer by $270,000.

[Update 7-11-08. Ten more stupid uses for Windows posted]

After all these years I am willing to admit that Microsoft has won the desktop and server wars. Thanks to VMWare Windows is spreading throughout the datacenter. And, of course, there is only one operating system to use if you are dependent on Microsoft apps like Outlook, Word, and Excel. While I have joined the chorus of security folks who rail against the Microsoft Monoculture I still cannot believe some of the uses for Windows. Some of them are just downright silly, some you may claim are criminally negligent.