Mike Wagner - Perpetual beta

April 19, 2006 | The Onion Issue 42•16 HUNTSVILLE, ONTARIO—Local beaver Dennis Messner is spending an inordinate amount of time and effort in the planning and construction phases of building his dam, according to neighbors close to the project. In the past four months, Messner, 4, has visited hundreds of other dams and drawn up detailed and extensive blueprints. He has researched topics ranging from advanced dome acoustics to the near-extinction of the North American beaver in the early 20th century, and plans to incorporate much of his research into his design. Enlarge ImageDennis Messner Dennis Messner "There are two primary schools of thought on dam building: the instinctive school and the adaptive school," Messner said, studying the river's current. "I'm more of an integration-minded postmodernist. I don't believe that form should follow function, like most of my colleagues do. On the other hand, a dam is a celebration of beaver culture, and that is what...

I was pleased to receive your gracious request for my presence at the small get-together to be held in your exalted halls on Thursday the 28th of July. Be assured that I was grateful for the warm tidings offered by you, the Arlington County Sheriff's Department, and please know I am fully aware of your overflowing social calendar. Therefore, it is with no small sense of remorse, particularly in light of the many previous engagements of ours that I have had cause to break, that I must regretfully decline your invitation.

I wouldn't quite call it "Bubble 2.0" just because VCs are eager to invest again. The Internet is a genuinely big deal. The bust was as much an overreaction as the boom. It's to be expected that once we started to pull out of the bust, there would be a lot of growth in this area, just as there was in the industries that spiked the sharpest before the Depression. The reason this won't turn into a second Bubble is that the IPO market is gone. Venture investors are driven by exit strategies. The reason they were funding all those laughable startups during the late 90s was that they hoped to sell them to gullible retail investors; they hoped to be laughing all the way to the bank. Now that route is closed. Now the default exit strategy is to get bought, and acquirers are less prone to irrational exuberance than IPO investors. The closest you'll get to Bubble valuations is Rupert Murdoch paying $580 million for Myspace. That's only off by a factor of 10 or so. ...

Your eyes which first held me captivated where I stood. Your smile to dazzle the sun and warm every corner of my soul. Your voice like a sparkling mountain stream which flows into my heart. Your walk and the way your gracefulness takes my breath away. Your hair about which I dreamed cascading into my face as you hover over me. Your hands whose caress I crave to hold my face in their tenderness. Your arms I long to have around my neck as you pull me close to your warmth. Most of all everything you are changed the way I feel about my life. I love you.

Dion Hinchcliffe -- Noted business and IT forward-thinker John Hagel wrote a detailed piece yesterday about what he calls the "highly dysfunctional gap" between SOA and Web 2.0. And it's true, there are few worlds in the IT industry that seem more opposite from each other, yet are more strangely intertwined, than SOA and Web 2.0. What will happen? IT Commandment: Put thy users first, above all else by ZDNet 's Dion Hinchcliffe -- While the concept of IT commandments sounds rigid and inflexible to me, I will admit there are some core truths that should almost never be violated. Fellow ZDNetter Paul Murphy has recently blazed this trail and it's an interesting experiment in seeing what people believe is fundamentallly important in IT if nothing else, and spark useful debates. IT commandments will be part of a ZDNet blog series over the next week or so.

The client-side technology known as Ajax continues to grow at an explosive rate, both in visibility and actual use. The number of Web developers who are learning Ajax and incorporating it into their applications is such that, increasingly, development managers must assess Ajax-related proposals from their technical staff. What is Ajax ? What value does it provide? Why is it growing in popularity? What toolkits are available, and how do they compare? What are the risks involved in adopting Ajax ? What are best practices for incorporating Ajax ? Ajax is the name given to a disparate collection of programming techniques that involve browser-side technologies such as JavaScript, Document Object Model, and background transfers between server and client of XML data and JavaScript objects. Ajax gained prominence early in 2005 with the widespread user adoption of innovative Web-based services from Google: Gmail (Web-based e-mail) and Google Maps. More recently, it seems that every new ...

SaaS as a software solution that is hosted and supported by a vendor as a service, which is accessed by users via the Internet, without the need to deploy and maintain an on-premise IT infrastructure. Whereas some people associate SaaS with ‘pay-as-you-go’ subscription pricing, SaaS is more indicative of the hosted deployment model. In fact, SaaS can be priced via subscription, annually or perpetually. SaaS has generated growing industry attention and customer acceptance because it offers a simpler method to adopt and administer essential business software applications such as enterprise spend management, ecommerce, workforce performance management (WPM), and customer relationship management (CRM). It also makes it easier for end-users to access and use these applications via the Internet. SaaS does not require additional IT infrastructure investments in new servers and databases to store data, or private networks to permit user access. Instead, companies can leverage the SaaS provider...