All About Bluestone Patios Bluestone patios can be very beautiful. They are my favorite stone! The stone itself is lovely. Bluestone can be rectilinear (squared off) or it can have a natural, uneven shape. If choosing the rectilinear style, you may use all one size or varying sizes in the pattern. As I explain below, when using this type of bluestone, one of the most important considerations is quality workmanship. I have some large pieces of bluestone set into my brick patio at my house.

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At Bluestone Technology Solutions. We offer full hosted plans including layout. There is no software downloads or technical expertise required on.

While I have issues with the brick (which is porous, old brick), the bluestone is just old faithful.looks good all the time with a timeless elegance. I wish the entire patio was bluestone! Shapes and Patterns When designing bluestone patios, I often use various sizes and shapes.

The photo below, taken on a Virginia garden tour, is a nice example. Typical bluestone sizes are 12' x 12', 12' x 18', 18' x 24', and 24' x 24'. These rectilinear stones can be laid parallel to another structure such as your residence, or they can be laid on the diagonal. Laying it on the diagonal gives it even more interest. It just goes to show that a simple design can be nice and fit a nice amount of furniture on it. What would the price be for?

Also find out the difference if you used pavers, brick or concrete! Ways To Set Bluestone Bluestone can be dry laid. The ground is excavated.

Stone, such as quarry stone is placed in the bottom layer. Sand or stone dust is the next layer and the stones laid on top of this. The stones may be laid tight together or a small space may be left between them. Joint sizes of 1/4 inch to 3/8 inch look nice. A sandy material is then swept into the joints. You may also place pea gravel in the joints.

Another option for the joints is polymeric sand, but this can have issues, such as cracking. Also, it rather defeats the purpose of having a dry laid application, since polymeric sand hardens. Bluestone can also be wet laid where it is set in concrete. Cracking is possible with this method, particularly in areas with lots of freeze-thaw conditions. A concrete base must be laid on virgin soil or soil that is tamped in layers. See a diagram of the correct way to (and also a dry laid one too). I prefer dry laid, as it is less expensive, creates a wonderful bluestone patio look, and is also forgiving.

What does forgiving mean? It means that it won't crack, and if a stone ever shifts, it can easily be reset. (Not so if you use polymeric sand in the joints.) I encourage you to take a look at my ebook on for some great information, ideas, and designs. Bluestone Colors Yes, there are different color choices! Bluestone is often called Pennsylvania Bluestone, as much of it comes from there.

Bluestone comes in 2 different color ranges which are both nice. (There is a third color range, but it's not as attractive as the others.) All Blue - all stones are the typical blue color and are pretty much the same. This can create an elegant look.

It is easy for other materials to look well with it as colors are not fighting each other. Personally, I like bluestone in the full range color choice. However, if you are adding any kind of stone wall nearby, the all blue is easier to work with as wall stones usually have many colors in them themselves. You can still get a nice look with full range.you just have to work a little harder to make sure the colors of all the stones go well together.

Another kind of bluestone is called 'thermal finish'. Here, the stones are slightly rougher than regular bluestone. It is a slightly different kind of look.

Thermal finish bluestone is also more expensive. Comments About Rectilinear Bluestone Good Workmanship a Must!. When using rectilinear bluestones, be aware that often they are not exactly squared off. This is not good!. In this situation, when they are placed, the joints between the stones will not be straight. Here is the solution:.

Have your contractor cut the stones with a wet saw to make them square. This is more work, and he will probably charge more for this, but it is important for a professional look for bluestone patios. You can also have the contractor select only the squared stones in the shipment. More stones may have to be ordered to accomplish this. There is nothing worse than looking at a bluestone patio and seeing joints that are not completely straight!

Company Name BLUESTONE SOFTWARE INC Company Address 300 STEVENS DRIVE PHILADELPHIA, PA 19113 Company Phone Company Website CEO P. Kevin Kilroy Employees (as of 6/30/1999) 152 State of Inc Fiscal Year End 12/31 Status Priced (9/24/1999) Proposed Symbol BLSW Exchange Share Price $15.00 Shares Offered 4,000,000 Offer Amount $60,000,000.00 Total Expenses $950,000.00 Shares Over Alloted 0 Shareholder Shares Offered - Shares Outstanding 17,274,732 Lockup Period (days) 180 Lockup Expiration 3/22/2000 Quiet Period Expiration CIK.

The net proceeds to us from the sale of 4,000,000 shares of common stock, at an initial public offering price of $15.00 per share, will be approximately $54.9 million after deducting underwriting discounts and commissions and estimated offering expenses payable by us. We will not receive any proceeds from the sale of shares by the selling stockholders if the underwriters' over-allotment option is exercised. While we have not determined the specific allocation of the net proceeds of this offering, we currently intend to use the net proceeds for product development, sales and marketing and working capital. Pending their application as described above, we intend to invest the net proceeds in short-term, investment-grade, interest-bearing securities.

The market for our products is intensely competitive, highly fragmented and characterized by rapid technological change and new product introductions. Recently, several of our competitors have been acquired by large software companies. Our competitors consist of a number of private and public companies including, among others: - BEA Systems, which acquired WebLogic; - IBM; - Microsoft; - Oracle; and - Sun Microsystems, which acquired NetDynamics and the rights to Netscape's Application Server.

In addition, we face competition from in-house software developers. Many of our competitors have longer operating histories, significantly greater financial, technical, marketing and other resources, greater name recognition, a broader product range and a larger base of installed customers than us. We expect to face increased competition in the future from our current competitors.

In addition, new competitors, or alliances among existing and future competitors, may emerge and rapidly gain significant market share. We may also face increased competition in the future from existing large business application and Internet software vendors that may broaden their product offerings to include Web application server software.

To the extent these vendors are able to offer systems that are functionally comparable or superior to our products, their significant installed customer bases, ability to offer a broad solution and ability to price their products as incremental add-ons to existing systems could provide them with a significant competitive advantage over us. We believe to be our relative share of the fragmented market for application server software. Our flagship product, Sapphire/Web, is a framework for JAVA Web application servers and is currently in Release 6. A Web application server is a software product that allows broad access to stored corporate information and applications to a variety of users, including customers, suppliers and employees, via the Web. We believe that our JAVA Web application server is the leading solution of its kind based on the breadth of its functionality. We believe that ours is the only product to adequately address the four defining elements of enterprise interaction management-development, deployment, integration and management-and therefore provides the most complete overall solution to our customers. In December 1998 at the Giga Information Group's Emerging Technology Conference, we demonstrated that our solution can meet the needs of virtually any enterprise by conducting a live simulation of an Internet commerce site running at a rate of over 100 million interactions per day.

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In January 1999, we released Bluestone XML-Server, which represents a new generation of specialized Web application server focused on commerce via the Internet. We participate in the following three separate markets: - THE MARKET FOR JAVA WEB APPLICATION SERVERS. In this market sector, enterprises employ our solutions to deploy their existing information technology assets for use in a Web environment, and to create new enterprise applications that are used via the Web. THE MARKET FOR EXTENDING THE SUPPLY CHAIN. In this market sector, our products enable the 'virtual corporation,' which means they allow an enterprise to integrate its information assets with those of its partners, vendors and customers to improve collaboration utilizing Web technology in a highly secure and scalable environment. THE MARKET FOR ENTERPRISE APPLICATION INTEGRATION. In this market sector, our products facilitate the integration of disparate computer systems within an enterprise.

We believe we are particularly well positioned in this market, since the necessary capabilities, including standardizing corporate data formats and providing access to existing information systems, are two of the core strengths of our JAVA Web application server software. Our solutions are used by some of the world's leading companies, including ARI, AT&T, Deutsche Bank, Dreyfus Corporation, Eli Lilly, Hewlett-Packard, Houghton Mifflin Company, Just For Feet, MCI WorldCom, OpenConnect and Reliance National.

OUR INDUSTRY GROWTH IN INTERNET RELATED SOFTWARE The Internet has experienced dramatic growth, both in terms of the number of users and as a means of conducting commercial transactions, and is expected to continue to grow rapidly. According to a report prepared by the Computer Industry Almanac Inc., an independent research organization, the number of Internet users was over 150 million in 1998, and is expected to grow to over 720 million by the end of 2005. The increase of users and business activities on the Web has created a large and growing market for Web application software as existing businesses and new Web-based enterprises foster new revenue streams, significantly broaden information deployment, enable inter-enterprise collaboration and strive to reduce the cost of maintaining an ever-changing technology infrastructure. An International Data Corporation report estimates that Internet-centric software, which accounted for $4.0 billion in revenue in 1997, will approach $16.0 billion by 2000 due to aggressive corporate adoption. THE RISE OF THE ENTERPRISE APPLICATION SERVER To date, most companies' use of Internet technology has consisted of employing Internet software products called Web servers to provide marketing material through their Web sites.

This technology allows the presentation of relatively simple information to users, such as pictures and text, through static documents. This static information must be preformatted with the information to be displayed, then manually changed when information is to be updated. This technology is still heavily in use today, but cannot sufficiently meet the quickly growing needs of companies to provide complex and dynamic information to their users. The existing information technology infrastructure of most companies leaves them unable to utilize, integrate or deploy existing information technology assets for Internet commerce or use over the Web.

These companies are recognizing that a broader set of facilities is required to capture the substantial benefits offered by Internet computing. These facilities include development capabilities that are specifically geared to a Web-based environment, interaction environments that are scalable and reliable, integration faculties that allow seamless linkages between the Internet and an enterprise's existing information infrastructure, and the ability to effectively monitor and manage Web-based applications and infrastructure.

Web application servers such as our software have emerged to provide these facilities. Web application servers, by design, allow scalable, secure real time, interactive access to complex information through the Web that is otherwise only available internally in an organization through its own applications and existing databases. They do this by providing the following capabilities: - load balancing-spreading the workload across multiple processors; - transaction management-tracking and assuring the completion of transactions; - integration to multiple back-end sources-making all enterprise information available for use; - an integrated development environment-a graphical tool to assist software developers; - application management-monitoring and reporting on all application server activity; and - multiple user support-the ability to individually serve a community of disparate users.

Demand for these capabilities has resulted in significant growth in the market for Web application servers. In an August 1998 report, Forrester Research, an independent research organization, estimated that the market for Application Server software would be approximately $700 million in 1999 and would grow to approximately $1.8 billion by 2001, representing a compound annual growth rate of approximately 60%. Another independent technology research organization, Ovum, estimated in June 1999 that the market for application server technologies, which they define in a manner that more closely resembles our addressable market, will grow to $17 billion by 2004. OUR SOLUTION We provide a comprehensive framework that enables businesses to deploy information across the Internet, or their proprietary company networks called intranets and extranets, to employees, customers, suppliers and partners. Our solution furnishes businesses with the ability to Web-enable existing information systems, develop new Web-based applications, and enable Internet commerce. Our deployment solution is certified by Sun Microsystems as 100% Pure JAVA and therefore operates in all enterprise computing environments.

We have recently introduced the capability to support Hot Swapping, which enables the movement of applications from one computer to another, and Hot Versioning, which enables software programs to be updated between user clicks. These features allow businesses to upgrade or fix their hardware and software without interrupting user interactions permitting true 24x7 operations. This is particularly critical for companies engaged in Internet commerce where down time can be very costly. We believe our solution is the only one available that provides the features and capabilities necessary for use in enterprise-scale, mission-critical applications.

In particular, our solution offers the following facilities: ROBUST DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT AND TOOLSET. Our solution includes an integrated development environment, which can be thought of as a programmer's toolkit, that uses industry-standard programming components to easily assemble applications and provides improved support for users with varying skill levels. This toolkit includes automated routines to generate user interfaces and the ability to import existing user interfaces from other sources, which increases a programming staff's development speed. The environment is open and highly adaptable, which allows programmers to increase their productivity by selecting the most appropriate tools for a given task. SCALABLE, OPEN, HIGH-PERFORMANCE DEPLOYMENT. The Web application server framework within our solution enables businesses to make their information available with a high degree of reliability, security and flexibility.

Our Web application server supports very high volumes of interactions and high numbers of concurrent users with caching, load balancing and fault-tolerance features, which optimize response times and ensure the integrity of applications. In addition, our standards-based, 100% Pure JAVA architecture allows for a high level of flexibility in operating systems, programming languages, and database access and communication protocols, with no dependence on proprietary technology. EXTENSIVE INTEGRATION CAPABILITIES. Our solution goes beyond application programming interfaces, or APIs, to facilitate communications between a business' computing systems with pre-built modules for Web-enabling today's dominant business applications, such as those from SAP and PeopleSoft.

Our solution also includes tools that allow programmers to rapidly build new integration modules for other applications, and generally enable complex information answers to be generated from any data source within the enterprise, no matter how remote or proprietary. These capabilities allow businesses to marry existing systems to new information delivery platforms, thereby preserving legacy investments. COMPREHENSIVE MANAGEMENT. Our solution provides the necessary means to monitor, administer and report on a business' entire Web infrastructure. These advanced features provide the means to perform administrative and management tasks easily and quickly, allow for real time reconfiguration of the information infrastructure, assure minimum and/or differentiated levels of service, and integrate with leading systems management utilities such as those from Computer Associates, IBM Tivoli, BMC and Hewlett-Packard. Our solution automatically generates alarms, alerts and reports, which allows for optimal performance of, and powerful insight into, a business' Web infrastructure.

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