Seven Tech Stocks For Long-Term Hold

One of the best ways to make money in the stock market is to identify high caliber companies early on in their history, and hold on to them through the long term (I mean years, not quarters). I particularly like companies that have large market forces driving them. In some cases, these may not be

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Catching Up on Readings: Hydro Alchemy

Since the last catching up list on April 26, you may have accumulated more backlog. What’s with the Yahoo-Microsoft frenzy? Here’s a quick cache of the articles since then that you may want to make sure you read:

Speeding Up the Internet: Algorithms Guru and Akamai Founder Tom Leighton (Part 10)

SM: What kinds of problems have you identified as big open problems you are going to tackle in the labs? TL: We are always working on making the service faster, scalable and more reliable. We have a team of folks that are looking for the 1 in 10,000 to the 1 in 100,000 “nasty thing”

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Speeding Up the Internet: Algorithms Guru and Akamai Founder Tom Leighton (Part 9)

SM: One of the concerns you must be facing now is how big can the CDN business be, and how fast can it grow? I am sure your investors like to see diversification as it is both risk and business diversification. Application acceleration provides that diversification, and I like it. TL: We consider it to

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Speeding Up the Internet: Algorithms Guru and Akamai Founder Tom Leighton (Part 8)

SM: How do you provide fast, reliable service globally? What is the secret there? TL: There are a bunch of things we do for that. In the old adage, having our servers near the end users rewards them. We sit on top of and find better routes on the Internet. We don’t change the protocol,

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Speeding Up the Internet: Algorithms Guru and Akamai Founder Tom Leighton (Part 7)

SM: This is a really big problem. How close to the last mile can you get? You are going to need millions of servers to cover the world. TL: I don’t think so. The way we think, a server can serve a gigabit a second. It is pretty economical. If you look at TV quality,

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Speeding Up the Internet: Algorithms Guru and Akamai Founder Tom Leighton (Part 6)

SM: So, you are saying that centralized data centers have higher latency, and thus lower throughput, and that prevents TV quality video or higher, making the video-on-demand experience unsatisfactory. Is there an example of this you could give? I think it would be helpful to illustrate the point. TL: We have a great case study

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Speeding Up the Internet: Algorithms Guru and Akamai Founder Tom Leighton (Part 5)

SM: Let’s take that question and apply it to all these recent media reactions you are getting about Level 3’s announcement that CDN is going to be a commodity and all these telcos are going to provide CDNs. [My previous coverage here.] TL: I think the Telcos have always provided CDN. There has been no

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