Happy 4th of July!!!

From The Washington Post

Microsoft experienced a ritual yesterday that is common to offices across America: a valued employee's last day. Co-workers paused to gather around their departing colleague, speeches were made and perhaps some cake was consumed.

But this employee isn't just any staff member; he is Bill Gates. Although he will remain chairman, his day-to-day role with the company is over. How do you sum up 33 years spent building the world's largest software company? What accomplishments do you highlight? What topics are best avoided for the sake of politeness?

In Gates's case, sometimes it's hard to tell.

The BASIC Way: 1975

Gates and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen wrote an efficient, useful version of this programming language that ran on the first personal computers, opening software development to mere hobbyists. From the first text-only, keyboard-bound MS-DOS releases onward, one of the foremost virtues of Microsoft's operating systems has been the staggering variety of third-party programs available for them.

Word Arrives: 1983

With this word-processing program, the company laid the foundations for its nearly omnipresent Microsoft Officesuite and largely defined how most people write today. (That's not all good: Many Word users think a 1985 Washington Post's review's description of Word as "slow and complicated" still applies.) A quarter-century later, Word has become such a standard that Microsoft's biggest marketing problem is persuading customers to trade up to new versions.

Replaced Windows: 1995

The jump from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 still constitutes the most dramatic improvement Microsoft has provided with an upgrade. Win 95 let millions of users forget about DOS commands and start checking out the Internet, and its interface set the pattern for Microsoft's subsequent operating systems. But Win 95 also standardized aspects of Microsoft computing, like the install/uninstall routines used to add or remove programs, that should have been retired years ago.

Explorer Sets Sail: 1995

This Web browser has gone from being an upstart innovator challenging a dominant player (Netscape Navigator) to the dominant player challenged by an upstart innovator (Navigator's open-source descendant, Mozilla Firefox). Why? Through arrogance or neglect, Microsoft all but ceased Explorer's development once it had monopoly status -- even as the Web became increasingly cluttered, confusing and dangerous.

Behind the Music: 1999

The company built the Windows Media Digital Rights Management software to help record labels and movie studios distribute controlled copies of their work online, but things didn't go according to the script. Some firms in Hollywood shied away from giving Microsoft such a major role in their business; stores running on Windows Media DRM repelled customers with absurd usage limitations; Apple built a simpler, more compatible DRM setup that customers could actually tolerate -- and now much of the music sold online comes without DRM at all.

Xbox Nation: 2001

The personal computers many people use these days don't look like traditional PCs at all. With the Xbox, Microsoft showed that it could compete outside the realm of machines with keyboards and mice -- and helped knock Sega out of the video game business.

Maria Sharapova lost in the second round at Wimbledon yesterday, but she still looked great.

The Washington Capital's Alex Ovechkin capped off a special season by capturing the NHL’s two most prestigious individual awards. He won the Hart Trophy as league MVP and the Lester B. Pearson Award as the players’ choice for the most outstanding player.

Oveckin also won the Rocket Richard Trophy with a league-best 65 goals and the Art Ross Trophy with 112 points.Ovechkin was the first player to score 60 goals since Mario Lemieux in 1996.

Capitals coach Bruce Boudreau, hired after Washington’s woeful start, earned the Jack Adams Award as the NHL’s top bench boss. Washington went 37-17-7 after Boudreau was hired on Nov. 22.

Almost 2 million people in the United States earn their living as artists, according to a new study by the National Endowment for the Arts. In number of artists, Washington ranks fourth among the top 50 metropolitan areas.

Marai Sharapova is into the round of 16 in the 2008 French Tennis Open.

The dueling Davids garnered a record 97.5 million votes between them, smashing the previous record by 23 million.

Also, it was announced that seventeen-year-old Josiah Leming, known as the teary-eyed "American Idol" contestant who just missed making it through the show's Hollywood audition rounds, has signed with Warner Bros. Records for a record and publishing deal. He is to begin recording his album this week.

Washington Capitals star left-winger Alex Ovechkin was named the 2008 National Hockey League player of the year by the Sporting News. Ovechkin picked up 250 of a possible 287 votes in a poll of players from around the NHL conducted for the sporting magazine.

The 22-year-old Russian led the NHL in goals with 65 to capture the league's Maurice (Rocket) Richard Trophy as the top goal-scorer and had 112 points to win the Art Ross Trophy as the league's leading scorer. Ovechkin led the league in power-play goals (22), game-winning goals (11) and shots (446).

Washington Post

Happy birthday, spam.

P.S.: Now go away.

It was 30 years ago this Saturday that users of Arpanet, a U.S. government-designed precursor to the Internet, logged onto their accounts to find what is considered the first piece of unsolicited commercial e-mail ever sent.

It was a pitch for a new computer. "We invite you to come see the 2020 and hear about the DECSYSTEM-20 family at the two product presentations we will be giving in California this month," read the missive, sent by a salesman named Gary Thuerk on May 3, 1978.

Thuerk's e-mail prompted an aggravated discussion among the service's users, the relatively small number of high-level academics with access to computers that then cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

"This is a clear and flagrant abuse of the directory!" one of the hundreds of users on Thuerk's recipient list complained in a public reply.

It's unclear at this point whether Thuerk was able to sell any computers through his then-novel approach, but both spam and spam prevention have grown into major industries since that day. Market research firm Ferris Research estimates that business will spend $42 billion fighting spam this year in the United States. That's up from $35 billion last year. ...read full article here...