Company names - how?

An interesting email has spread through our office today. It was about the stories behind the famous IT company names. I share the fun with you all.

Apple Computers

It was the favourite 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 trad emarked 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.

Asian Tsunami videos

A collection of video captures of the Tsunami devastation (26-12-2004) in Asia has been maintained at the following site.

Asian Tsunami Videos

You can download all the files (if you have a good internet connection bandwidth) and watch offline.

Imagine... what a hell it would have been.

Firefox - Still Good

I installed some extensions to the firefox browser.

Tabbrowser Preferences 1.1.1
DictionarySearch 0.7
GMail Notifier 0.4

The extensions is a very attractive feature of this new innovative browser even though there are some minor bugs with the functionality.
Tabbed browsing is perfect and compact feature for 'browse-mania' persons like myself.

Dictionary search, fetches the meaning of the word highlighted from the dictionaries we specify in the 'options'. Hightlight -> Right click -> Dictinary Search = a nice feature for any application particularly for internet browsers. It saves lot of time spent in opening the online distionary site and search for the meaning.

GMail notifier is again a useful tool which helps to check periodically whether there are new mails arrived to our gmail account. Since we have some other applications which do the same task, I can say this is just an addition to the browser.

Other than what I have installed as extensions there are lot more interesting stuff available for this atrracting browser. Just Go to Tools -> Extensions, and select 'Get more extensions' to reach the web site of all extensions.

Related links:
Firefox Home
Firefox Extensions

Open Source Monopoly

Today I found an article on the net about the open source softwares and the meanings of their licensing.

The Open Source Monopoly

The author talks about the real meaning of 'open source' in respect of the OSI (Open Source Initiatives) certification. He classifies the two major categories of the open source softwares as;

1. Volunteer model
2. Commercial model

Considering the currently existing open source software licenses such as Apache Software Foundation (ASF), Free Software Foundation (FSF), Sun Developer comunity, etc., he explains the advantages and the problems in detail.

I urge everybody involved in the software world to read this useful article (paper).

Exams are Over

Our MSc (semester 2) exams are finished with today's 'Advanced Databases' paper. Thanks to Dr. Rukshan for setting the paper with reasonable difficulty (Actually we expected more from him).

My new year plans are scheduled from today due to the focus of the exams until yesterday.

I wish to have and experience mainly good things this year. Lot of things awaiting, I have to do them on time with confidence.

Good Day

I was very much eager to create a blog site last year. But due to my workload with the MSc course works I couldn't do that.

Now is the time. I have finished the lectures with the last year, and now I can concentrate on this also :)

I decided to maintain (regular posts) this blog for life long (provided that the blogger exists). Hope I will make the entries interesting and entertaining.

Hope the best!