Dylan Tweney

Good news for California citizens: Now you can be notified by pager when your neighborhood is scheduled for a rolling blackout. “Oh goody,” millions of power-hungry Californians are no doubt thinking. “Now I can plan ahead for those enforced hours of idleness and darkness when the power cuts out.” P

Do you know how much your website’s home page weighs? The question may sound ridiculous: How can something composed of evanescent electrons and photons “weigh” anything? But in the parlance of Web design, “weight” is shorthand for how big a webpage is, in kilobytes. A “heavy” Webpage will take a lon

A Georgia State IT administrator is being prosecuted for installing P2P software on college computers. The university says that in so doing, he robbed them of more than $400,000 worth of bandwidth. This, even though the software primarily ran during the December break, when the computers were otherw

I have to admit I didn’t call this one: Webvan is going out of business, making official what observers have been speculating for months. In the two years since it got started, Webvan burned through about a billion dollars of investors’ money (OK, it was actually $800 million, but whats a few hundre

In an ancient Chinese legend, the emperor offers a reward to the man who has just invented the game of chess. The inventor modestly asks for one grain of rice on the chessboard’s first square, two grains on the next square, four grains on the third, and so on, doubling every square. The emperor, thi

Psssst. A word of warning: Your company is being invaded by a seemingly innocuous consumer technology that could compromise your deepest corporate secrets, render you vulnerable to lawsuits, and adversely affect employee productivity. The name of this Trojan horse? Instant messaging. And it’s your e

Having a search engine on your website is critical, because no matter how intuitive your site’s interface is, there will always be people who can’t find their way around. A search engine acts like a lifeline for these customers, connecting them to the pages they want before they drift away from your

Face it, the Internet we know today is slow and clunky. It’s getting better, but it’s still not the lightning-fast medium everyone wants, and the functionality is limited by the network pipelines. But all that could change with Internet2 — yes, that’s right, the Internet has a sequel. A coalition of

Q&A: John E. Marion II, Ph.D. On Development Of Smart Probe For Breast Cancer DetectionD.F. Tweney, Special to SF GateTuesday, May 15, 2001 Breast cancer is the second leading cause of death among women in the UnitedStates. Last year, more than 182,800 women were diagnosed with breast cancer, and40,

There are about 6 billion people on Earth. Currently, only a fraction are online — maybe half a billion of us. But that number is expanding rapidly — and will balloon even more quickly when Internet-enabled mobile phones become the Internet-access device of choice in many developing countries. By th

Link: Open secrets Link broken? Try the Wayback Machine.

We all know that the information is out there, but who knows how to find it? Consider, for example, Ames Department Stores, headquartered in Rocky Hill, Conn., a discount retail chain with 452 outlets: Until recently sales managers there had to spend as much as a day combing through numerous databas