InformationWeek > Financials > Google Files Long-Awaited IPO > April 29, 2004- "The company's S-1 filing reveals that Google has been profitable for the past three years, showing a profit of $105.6 million in 2003 on revenues of $961.8 million. That's more than 10 times its 2001 revenue. "

Wow! That is a huge amount of revenue and a tremendous profit.  Companies that are showing a profit over 10% are not that common.

6:16:03 PM    

Microsoft Confirms Bug In SSL Patch - "Microsoft Corp. has confirmed in a knowledge base article that its patch for a critical bug can cause some Windows 2000 systems to lock up and fail at boot time.
The patch is for a particularly critical vulnerability of which experts have begun to see exploits in the last few days.
The knowledge base article goes by the unusually long name: "Your computer stops responding, you cannot log on to Windows, or your CPU usage for the System process approaches 100 percent after you install the security update that is described in Microsoft Security Bulletin MS04-011." " - Eweek.com

About time.  I noted problems with this patch in this post to teknoids.

11:48:45 AM    

CNN.com - Music industry sues 477 more computer users - Apr 28, 2004 -"The trade group said the newest lawsuits targeted students at Mansfield; Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island; Emory University in Atlanta; Georgia Institute of Technology; Gonzaga University of Spokane, Washington; Michigan State University; Princeton University in New Jersey; Sacred Heart University of Fairfield, Connecticut; Texas A&M University; Trinity College of Hartford, Connecticut; Trinity University of San Antonio; the University of Kansas; University of Minnesota and Virginia Polytechnic Institute."

According to the article these are 'John Doe' suits and the RIAA intends to use subpeonas to get information to link individuals to IP addresses cited in the suit.  It will be interesting to see what Emory's response to this is. For more information, see this Slashdot piece.

9:27:50 AM    

Computerworld.com -   A Sunny Forecast for Open-Source  "Four years ago, Weather.com, the online counterpart of The Weather Channel Interactive Inc.'s 24-hour TV channel, relied entirely on proprietary commercial software to serve up millions of Web pages of maps, forecasts and hour-by-hour weather data every day. 
Today, the Atlanta-based Web site serves more than 50 million pages on stormy days, but it runs almost entirely on open-source software and commodity hardware. And since the move to the new architecture, it has slashed IT costs by one-third and increased Web site processing capacity by 30%. "

An excellent case study in a very large web site moving from proprietary systems (Solaris, Oracle, Websphere, Netscape) to open source systems (Linux, MySQL, Tomcat, Apache) and seeing big gains in relaibility and scalability without experiencing any of the problems predicted by the vendors being replaced.  There is a timeline for the move here.

8:59:36 AM    

New Bagle, Netsky Worms on the Loose. A pair of new mass-mailing worms hit corporate networks Wednesday. While bothersome to IT managers, security experts rated the threats as mid-level risks. [eWEEK Technology News]

I had to rebuild ClamAV on our system to stop them. 

8:53:12 AM