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According to an article by Dave Kramer, on Flashback (a Microsoft Web site page):

“The first Microsoft Internet site was born in early 1993. Group Manager John Martin of Microsoft’s Corporate Network Systems group sought and received the charter to post Microsoft support resources, previously available only on a CompuServe forum, to a public FTP server. The site was named gowinnt.microsoft.com in honor of the keyword used to access the forum on CompuServe. It was later changed to ftp.microsoft.com, to better map with Internet naming conventions. ”

“Today, microsoft.com is the fourth-largest Web site (per Media Metrix), powered by internal and external servers all over the world and visited by an average of 5 million customers a day.”

Thanks to Nick Bradbury, who thanks Jack Brewster for the link. Nick is the creater of HomeSite, TopStyle, and FeedDemon.

There is a tech writing blog in India. In its own words:

About this blog

This is a community blog on Technical Writing. A blog that aims to capture interesting and useful information that’s beneficial to tech writers. Though this blog has an India tilt, tech writers from around the world are welcome to join in. Though this blog has an India tilt, tech writers from around the world are welcome to join in.

We welcome tech writers to share in interesting information and experiences. If you want to join in as an author, all you need to do is shoot across an email and you will be given an author access.

Technical writing is still in (at most) its adolescence in India. I understand that no universities in India offer majors in technical communcation.

Except for on-the-job training by other tech writers who have studied the discipline elsewhere, the Society for Technical Communication seems to be the major source for such education. As of January 2004, the India chapter has 85 members, of whom 9 are senior members. They do have an Annual Conference. There is but one chapter for all of India, principally divided among Mumbai, Bangalore, and Chennai. Looks like it would be a great place for STC to expand its conference call educational program.

I’ll be adding ths blog to my Tech Writing roll on the left. So far, it does not offer syndication, so I can’t add it to my aggregator.

For those who haven’t noticed — take a look in the upper right corner of this page. Click there to visit the Firefox main page.

Firefox is the latest incarnation of the next generation of Mozilla browsers. Long ago, the browser was called “Phoenix.” Then it became “Firebird”. Now, it’s Firefox (0.8). The release notes report several new features, including a proper Windows installer (not just download-and-copy), an improved download manager, and a new Add Bookmark dialog. One other feature I just noticed, but it may not be new, is the ability to have a set of tabbed pages be your home page. I’ve been using it for about a week and a half (since Molly Hozschlag pointed it out) and it quickly became my default browser, displacing Firebird.

Slashdot has an interesting posting entitled “Indian Techies Answer About ‘Onshore Insourcing’” in which we see questions and answers like the following [edited for space]:

How much experience do most Indian programmers have?

It’s common here for new grads (slang term: “freshers”) to spend up to six months in a low-paid or even unpaid internship before they get a “‘real” job. This is true not only of programmers and other IT people, but in almost all white collar positions. …

Many US business pundits claim that the US is only outsourcing the low end code monkey and support jobs, and is keeping the higher end, more prestigious “project management” and architect jobs in the US?

“Ha, ha, ha, ha. It is the same everywhere. Some of us are good at this work, but many aren’t. There are code monkeys everywhere. Real programmers, too, and real programmers here call code monkeys ‘code monkeys’ here same as anywhere else. Pass me another beer, will you?”

What does a decent 2 bedroom apartment cost per month?

How about food for 1 month?

Utilities, etc?

I was asking this question in New Delhi, India’s capital city, and living costs in India vary as much as they do anywhere else depending on where you live. I met programmers who lived in apartments and houses that cost anywhere between $200 and $500 per month, and a few who lived in compounds their families had owned for generations. The consensus was that $11,000 or $12,000 (US) per year was plenty to support a middle class lifestyle. But “middle class” there is not the same as in the U.S. …

Bottom line: You can have a decent life in New Delhi for around $12,000 US per year — but to earn that much you’ll probably need to have source of income from another country…

I work for a company founded from the get-go with two offices in India and HQ in Silicon Valley. About half our techical staff is in India. What I am observing is that “freshers” arrive, work for several months, and move on. Reminds me of the dot boom here in the valley.

I am a progressive. I am very concerned about the way our federal government has seized upon the tragedy of September 11, 2001 to trample our civil liberties. In a column in the Arizona Republic’s “Plugged In,” Earl de Berge has laid out what I consider a conservative position that I can whole-heartedly support.

Mr. de Berge updates the rallying cry “Don’t tread on me!” to “Don’t snoop on us.”

I do hope that true progressives and true conservatives can join to remove, or at the very least revise, the Patriot Act to restore our civil liberties.

Edward W. Felten, of Princeton, has a weblog: Freedom to Tinker which describes itself as

your freedom to understand, discuss, repair, and modify the technological devices you own.

From what I have seen, the “understand” and “discuss” posts way outnumber the “repair” and “modify” ones, but it looks interesting enough that I’ll subscribe for a while to watch it unfold.

Statement from Microsoft Regarding Illegal Posting of Windows Source Code

Last updated: Feb. 13, 2004, 6:00 p.m. PST

REDMOND, Wash., Updated Feb. 13, 2004 — On Thursday, February 12, Microsoft became aware that portions of the Microsoft Windows 2000 and Windows NT 4.0 source code were illegally made available on the Internet.
[full statement]

The Blogzilla site has posted a small portion of that code.

Take the Dolphin Stress Test. As the site says:

It’s a simple test designed to indicate whether people have too much stress in their life.

eFios describes itself as

an independent consultancy company that focuses on implementations of web based collaboration inside the enterprise.

On their weblog page, they recently (well, on 29 December 2003) entered a posting about “STC’s transformation process: blogging for open communication”. [Be patient — it has a slow response time.]

I certainly hope that the STC weblog will be kept up even when its initial purpose is fulfilled. But even if it is not, pieces of it will persist, quoted in other weblogs for some time. Why? Because it reveals an innovative way for an organization to discuss reinventing itself with its members and with the public at large. I know of several weblogs that point to the transformation weblog, and it would be shame to lose this landmark of organizational self-examination.

[Thanks to Smart Meeting Design for pointing this out, and to Bloglines which provided the mechanism for me to subscribe to a search that watches for postings that mention “STC”.]

According to an article in today’s New York Times (registration required), entitled “Yours Not So Truly, J. Goodspam,” a gentleman by the seemingly improbable name of August Kleimo has produced a random name generator. It seems that he harvested the information from the U. S. Census Bureau’s Web site. The names came from the 1990 census, so they are reasonably current.

Authors, technical writers, and spammers might find it useful. — but I would worry about bandwidth for at least a few days, Mr. Kleimo.