Year / 2006

by Nirupam Biswas

Origins of companies.

My mid-sem is on 6th of September. It will be over in a week. I couldn’t help myself against posting this now. This is good info. Read on.
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There are many companies / brands / products whose names were derived from strange circumstances.

Mercedes
This was actually the financier’s daughter’s name.

Adobe
This came from name of the river Adobe Creek that ran
behind the house of founder John Warnock.

Apple Computers
It was the favorite fruit of founder Steve Jobs. He was three months late in filing a name for the business, and he threatened to call his company Apple Computers if the other colleagues didn’t suggest a better name by 5 O’clock.

CISCO
It is not an acronym as popularly believed. It is short for San Francisco.

Compaq
This name was formed by using COMp, for computer, and PAQ to denote a small integral object.

Corel
The name was derived from the founder’s name Dr. Michael Cowpland. It stands for COwpland REsearch Laboratory.

Google
The name started as a joke boasting about the amount of information the search-engine would be able to search. It was originally named ‘Googol’, a word for the number
represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros. After founders – Stanford graduate students Sergey Brin and Larry Page presented their project to an angel investor, they received a cheque made out to ‘Google’

Hotmail
Founder Jack Smith got the idea of accessing e-mail via the web from a computer anywhere in the world. When Sabeer Bhatia came up with the business plan for the mail service, he tried all kinds of names ending in ‘mail’ and finally settled for hotmail as it included the letters “html” – the programming language used to write web pages. It was
initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective uppercasing.

Hewlett Packard
Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide whether the company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett.

Intel
Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore wanted to name their new company ‘Moore Noyce’ but that was already trademarked by a hotel chain so they had to settle for an acronym
of INTegrated ELectronics.

Lotus (Notes)
Mitch Kapor got the name for his company from ‘The Lotus Position’ or ‘Padmasana’. Kapor used to be a teacher of Transcendental Meditation of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

Microsoft
Coined by Bill Gates to represent the company that was devoted to MICROcomputer SOFTware. Originally christened Micro-Soft, the ‘-‘ was removed later on.

Motorola
Founder Paul Galvin came up with this name when his company started
manufacturing radios for cars. The popular radio company at the time was called Victrola.

ORACLE
Larry Ellison and Bob Oats were working on a consulting project for the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). The code name for the project was called Oracle (the CIA saw this as the system to give answers to all questions or something such). The project was
designed to help use the newly written SQL code by IBM. The project eventually was terminated but Larry and Bob decided to finish what they started and bring
it to the world. They kept the name Oracle and created the RDBMS engine. Later they kept the same name for the company.

Sony
It originated from the Latin word ‘sonus’ meaning sound, and ‘sonny’ a slang used by Americans to refer to a bright youngster.

SUN
Founded by 4 Stanford University buddies, SUN is the acronym for Stanford University Network. Andreas Bechtolsheim built a microcomputer; Vinod Khosla recruited him and Scott McNealy to manufacture computers based on it, and Bill Joy to develop a
UNIX-based OS for the computer.

Yahoo!
The word was invented by Jonathan Swift and used in his book ‘Gulliver’s Travels’. It represents a person who is repulsive in appearance and action and is barely human. Yahoo! Founders Jerry Yang and David Filo selected the name because they considered
themselves yahoos.

by Nirupam Biswas

No blogging till mid-sem.

Hi,

Of late I have not been posting anything. I am not dead but actually I have been (well I am still) quite busy with my brand new laptop – HP Pavilion dv5200TX. Furthermore, our mid-semister exam is due on 6th of September. I am still to know the syllabus. The exam will be over in a week. I am itching to tell you about my laptop and the mathematical treat I promised.

…..er…I forgot to mention that if you are viewing my site using Internet Explorer 6 then you maybe seeing the side-bar misplaced at the bottom rather than the side. Use Internet Explorer 7 beta3 or better use Mozilla Firefox.

by Nirupam Biswas

Computer Science is Great – The Proof

In our college there is a general feeling that computer science is a useless, fancy engineering branch, but I beg to disagree. Without us (programmers) the computer is a useless junk. I made this animation video as a proof for that.This video has been made in Blender and edited in Windows Movie Maker. Everything, even the ‘It is a Junk without us’ portion too has been done in Blender, but, the credits portion has been done in Windows Movie Maker.

by Nirupam Biswas

I am back!

My college has started. This is the 3rd week of new session. We don’t have decent (rather hard to access) internet facility in our college. I come back to my home every Saturday and hence I can only logon only on Saturday and Sundays (now hopefully on Fridays too). It really sucks, because I can’t keep my blog updated and read the barrage of emails I receive and the read the daily news on Blender.

Anyway, if you want to keep track of any thing new on this blog then all you need is subscribe to the Atom or RSS feed of this site. In Firefox you can add the site feed as a bookmark. Or if you have any other RSS feed reader then use this url to subscribe: http://applegrew.blogspot.com/atom.xml.

About forthcoming article: I am going to make series of posts about “Digitisation Mathematics“. Never heard of such a thing? Well, it is a not-so-small mathematical operations I made in my spare time when I was in std 6 (not sure about it). We normally deal with numbers as a whole, but here I deal with individual or some smaller groups of digits only. I will use this to prove some theorems and will also draw parallels with popular theorems for general mathematics.

This will be a treat for mathematical enthusiasts. Keep watching.

by Nirupam Biswas

Webtop or WebOS. Operating System on Internet.

(The picture at bottom is that of Goowy and the one on top is that of YouOS.)

I recently came to know about goowy.com and www.youos.com. They are online operating systems. Yes, online, web-based OS. This does not mean that you will not require a OS on your computer (yet). You will need atleast an OS, a browser and of course an Internet connection to access it. They are actually web-based application mimicking the user interface of an OS. They have wordprocessor, chatting software, games and more. This is a very novel approach. Now effectively you can take the whole desktop around the world without actually carrying it. So, now you can work on your documents anywhere around the internet and you are safe from any hardware or virus infecting your precious work. What’s more, you can even work on heavy application on your an era old computer.

I must mention that they are still in development stage. Goowy in beta and youos in alpha stage. Both of them have linux like graphical interface. Goowy has a good interface and also has a chat facility for Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, etc. users. YouOS on the other hand probaly allows only IRC chatting. YouOS though have a wordprocessor which I didn’t find in Goowy. Goowy is flash based where as YouOS is javascript based, hence in YouOS you can interact like a real OS and right click on the desktop to bring up a menu to chage wallpaper, whereas in Goowy we get the Flash player’s menu.

This is indeed a good concept. They need to evolve more to be made really usefull. Go to their sites and click on ‘Try a Demo’ to launch the OS right away.

by Nirupam Biswas

The screen billbord. Pixels for Hire!

This is one of the most innovative ad sites ever on the internet. This site has nothing but advertisements, but with a twist. Advertisers are required to hire pixels on the site at $1 per pixel. There are 1 million pixels available. This very much like hiring billboard space; very innovative. Click on the small ads to goto the advertising company. See for yourself. The site is http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com. He has already sold out all his million pixels, that means, he is a millionaire! Hats off; you deserve it for this splendid idea.

Below is a small frame showing the site.

Update: I have now found that this kind of advertising has now come to known as “pixel ad”. Google for this term and you will get so many such sites. I beleive that milliondollarhompage.com is the original pixel advertising site. I read about this in a computer magazine long ago. If you have any more info on this then post a comment.