a cactus update

A short status update on clevercactus: lots of work in progress to improve current features and add some other important missing elements. On the works:

• HTML Editing, particularly important for weblog postings
• Bugfixes for mail connection/parsing classes, especially IMAP
• Initial P2P sharing implementation
• Bugfixes for calendar views
• Improvements in speed and memory usage

...among other things. A new beta version will be released before the end of the month, and after that version 1.0 should be forthcoming. Getting there!

new java logo

Russ posted screenshot of the new Java logo. Nice!

the rise of dell

An interesting story from News.com on Dell, and how it became the biggest vendor of PCs. Quote:

In 1994, Dell was a struggling second-tier PC maker. Like other PC makers, Dell ordered its components in advance and carried a large amount of component inventory. If its forecasts were wrong, Dell had major write-downs.

Then Dell began to implement a new business model. Its operations had always featured a build-to-order process with direct sales to customers, but Dell took a series of ingenious steps to eliminate its inventories. The results were spectacular.

The story doesn't completely oversimplify what happened which is good. (However, in these accounts, I'm always amazed that they completely ignore the errors of a company's competitors, which play a key role in winning anything). Interesting.