About one month after the version 1.7 of Sauce Reader, Synop launched an updated version of its great feed reader (first review, second one), which is available for free download (for personal use).

What’s new?

Along with many bug fixes, this release has one major new feature:

URL Feed support to monitor and store changes to any web page.

Using this feature, you can now monitor updates to any web page using Sauce Reader. Monitoring a URL for any changes, Sauce Reader will download a complete copy of the page for offline browsing (MHTML file). Use this feature to:

Keep a complete record of all versions of a web page over time.

Monitor infrequently changed pages that do not publish a feed.

Wow, it sounds interesting :-)

Another interesting article of the Knowledge@Wharton about the role of corporation in our society. The article is based on some inputs from a documentary film called The Corporation and the corresponding book – The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power.

Both are an attempt to create a new definition of goals and responsibilities for the business world consistent with the realities of the 21st century. The key to this reappraisal is the concept of a "sustainable economy.

I don’t know the book and the movie, I found interesting that the authors point out that:

Acting to make Interface an entirely self-sustaining and ecologically responsible firm by 2020, [its founder and Chairman, Ray Anderson,] has guided his company to a record of remarkable achievement. In the July 19, 2004, issue of BusinessWeek, data supplied by Interface show that waste produced by the company has been reduced by 80%, water intake is down by 78%, emissions of greenhouse gases down by 46%, energy consumption cut by 31% and use of petroleum-based materials by 28%. The final figure is in some ways the most persuasive, detailing a total savings of $231 million. Ethics and profits are indeed compatible.

Great concrete example!

Source: A Critical Look at the Corporation’s Dominant Role in Society

Google’s Tribute to Ray Charles today. Ray was born on September 23 1930.

September 23, autumn is already here….

One way to “fight” against the autumn’s spirit, a good chimney fire! The first one since last winter.

I visited one of the datacenter of Triaton in Frankfurt (Germany) yesterday. Quite impressive! We had a chance to have a look at the second mainframe which was installed in Europe! This installation happened in 1957-58 by the Hoechst chemical company. It was a 701 model. The goal was to organize better the payroll system. Already a Business Process Re-engineering project ;-) I was surprised that IBM already had more than 80’000 employees in 1957…

I couldn’t take some pictures but I found some funny and interesting pictures and information on the IBM’s website. Have a look at these pictures and the incredible power of this machine!

Overview of the mainframe (the one we saw was bigger)

The incredible control panel

The magnetic core storage unit

The vacuum tubes

System performance

Source: IBM model 701 exhibits

I passed the “200 posts” milestone on last Friday :-)

Thanx all for taking some time here!

Image source: Wikipedia

Digital Web Magazine published an interesting interview with Mena Trott – co-founder and owner of SixApart – about SixApart itself, Movable Type and the blogging tool market. To be read!

DigitalWeb: How do you characterize the nature of the competition between you and Blogger and WordPress, and some of the other folks out there? Is it collaborative, with everyone wanting to grow the whole industry in an effort to get a piece of a bigger pie, or is it becoming more competitive?

Mena Trott: It’s hard. We and Blogger are both very focused on what we’re doing. In terms of knowing people, we talk to the Blogger team a lot and are on very good terms with them. We both have such different markets. When you have a free product and a subscription product in the same market, there is overlap, but it’s not cutthroat. In terms of collaboration, there can be more.

Unfortunately, we’re given a rap because we are so dominant, I guess, in terms of use. People see us as this big guy who they want to bring down, oddly, when we really aren’t—we’re still a small company. That’s frustrating. We’re more than willing to work with people. Being big and corporate completely goes against the things the company is all about.

[via eMarketer]

About 50% of new motor vehicle buyers have had their decisions on make/model and price influenced by information they found on the Internet.

One reason for the rising popularity of manufacturer sites is that they generally provide the most accurate information on the vehicles.

So, as it is clearly a trend, I would like to test myself the AdSense program of Google. I tried to integrate it “smoothly” in my weblog (see right to the title).

First impression: the contextual choice of the ads is really working very well. Impressing…

I’m testing the beta version 7.0 of Perfect Disk from Raxco since yesterday. Already published a review of the version 6.0 of Perfect Disk.

It seems that the guys from Raxco did a good job! New features:

20% less memory consumption

Improved speed on larger drives

Improved user interface

Support for mount points

Network Configuration Management Wizard – Allows you to globally set most of PerfectDisk’s registry keys without using Active Directory.