Technology

More than half of all U.S. publicly-traded companies & and two-thirds of Fortune 500 firms & are incorporated in Delaware because of its business-friendly laws and well-established corporate legal precedence.

The state, which doesn't have a sales tax, gets nearly one-third of its revenue from franchise taxes on more than a million corporate entities, accounting for $1.3 billion of its $4.2 billion general coffer. Making incorporating in the state more attractive is seen as a money maker and competitive advantage against other states.

To that end, Delaware in October plans to launch a proof-of-concept for a blockchain-based business filing system that will allow corporations to take advantage of smart contract technology to automatically track stocks and collateral assets in real time; being able to do so will give lenders and borrowers a more efficient and accurate record with which to transact business and meet state and federal regulations.

This law-enforcement agency stores its mainframe data with time stamps on every record. That can be important, especially in court cases, says a database admin pilot fish there.

"In my role as a DBA, I have the chance to educate the rest of the IT staff," fish says. "I was showing some programmers how easy it is to use the 'time zone' information available from the operating system."

Fish tells the crowd that the time-zone setting shows hours and minutes offset from UTC -- what used to be called Greenwich Mean Time.

Hours and minutes Yes, fish explains, there are places where the official local time is shifted by an extra half-hour or even 45 minutes.

This week Microsoft (disclosure: Microsoft is a client of the author) announced the Microsoft Surface Go. This is an original iPad sized Surface product with a base price of just under $400 that uses a Pentium processor and has 9 hours of battery life. While the iPad is clearly the competitive target, particularly in education, you can also see it as a hedge against the Chromebook which has been making inroads in education and in a lot of trials, but few (if any yet) successful deployments in the enterprise market.