Business 2.0

Many companies try to mine their mountains of data for new marketing ventures and better customer information. But are they finding gold in there — or garbage? Information is power, as the saying goes, and if that’s true, bad information is worse than no information at all. Bad information tricks yo

In the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, a sentient (if ultimately haywire) shipboard computer named HAL 9000 converses with astronauts. Computers today aren’t smart enough to second-guess our actions (thankfully) or to carry on long, rambling discussions. But speech recognition software has gotten g

When it comes to network security, your corporate IT department probably has the company’s computers locked up in the technological equivalent of a medieval fortress. Your systems are likely ensconced behind a firewall, with antivirus monitoring software patrolling the perimeters and an array of add

So you’ve just finished the big website redesign. Your designers and engineers have put in hundreds of hours, you’ve quelled three rebellions in the IT department, and you’ve put the site through extensive QA testing. Now you’re ready to switch on the site and pop open the bubbly, right? Not so fast

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

Cash for Code Programmers jump on the money train. Dylan Tweney 07/25/2000 Steve Elfanbaum wants to help his fellow code geeks make some extra cash.Photo: Stephen Kennedy View the Independent’s Day Xplanation Let’s not foster any illusions about open source software: If you’re a programmer, it’s not