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The developer can still develop fine with a single monitor. He will just be much slower. http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2009/02/18/234899/Multiple-monitors-boost-productivity-by-35.5.htm

    That study says that going from one monitor to three gives a 35% productivity boost. If the cost of the programmer to the company is 100K a year (if you include all overhead, it is probably more than that), then the company will experience a loss of 25K worth of labor by cheaping out and not spending a few hundred bucks on a couple more monitors. Basically, the extra monitors pay for themselves in one week. What business wouldn't want to do this?

      I personally believe so strongly that there is a huge productivity gain from extra screen real estate, that I've had an eight monitor set up for many years now. Here's my first http://www.realtimesoft.com/multimon/gallery_browse.asp?ID=636&date=desc&nummon=true&mon=desc

    The lower row is what I'm currently working on. The upper row is where I put things that other people would minimize or let other applications cover them. Basically, I never minimize to the taskbar, and I almost never have windows covering other windows. I would say this setup has improved my productivity at least 50%, and made my work much less stressful.

    When I first built an Octomon setup (that's what I call it), it cost about 12 grand. If I were building one today, I would probably go with four 30" monitors (even more pixels than my eight 24" monitors) or eight of the Apple 27" monitors. Either way would be significantly less than what it used to cost for a much better system. There are great video cards out these days that make building these systems a snap (my first one took about two days of fiddling and trying different video cards to make it work).

In that case, Microsoft should no longer be able to blame business partners, contractors, customers, or whatever for their own problems, either.

http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2011/01/20/244979/Microsoft-blames-third-party-for-excessive-Windows-Phone-7-data.htm
http://theregoesdave.com/2009/10/15/microsoft-goes-schizo-starts-blaming-danger-for-lost-data/
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/70560,microsoft-blames-vista-insecurity-on-third-party-applications.aspx

You can't have it both ways, Microsoft. You want GM liable for software piracy in China, then you should be liable for Windows 7 phone phantom data usage.

`Security firms have identified a new variant of a USB-based zero-day attack that exploits a vulnerabiltiy in Microsoft Windows, including Windows 7'

Affected and Non-Affected Software

I'd like to add some recent history to your timeline and hopefully shed some light on what happened

For months there was absolutely no news from Oracle as to what their plan was for OOo. (fact) They saw what was happening to other Sun projects and forked it. (my opinion)
http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2010/09/28/243059/OpenOffice.org-claims-independence-from-Oracle.htm

2 weeks later, Oracle came out and said "Heck no, we love OOo and will continue to develop it"
http://www.infoworld.com/d/applications/oracle-pledges-support-openofficeorg-593

So, there you go. I'd have done the same thing TDF did. I can't sit next to the phone forever

You can buy similar hardware (from my favorite company HP or even many others such as Asus)

I beg to differ.

Albeit the processor/memory/hard drive/video card are the same, I see little innovation coming from individual PC vendors. They basically imitate each other. It almost seems as they are collaborating instead of competing, each one improving in a small step that everyone else will then copy.

I wouldn't mention that other pc makers wouldn't probably even exist without the apple 2. And Windows also, without the Macintosh, the mouse they got from xerox and made useful in people's computers, and the Mac OS.

No, I will talk about the notebooks.

Before Apple entered the notebook business, notebooks had the keyboard touching the outer border, with no wrist rest. The back of the keyboard was so useless than canon even managed to stick a printer in there [1]. So you can account for the wrist rest. Oh, and also the trackpad. Because my HP notebook had a button that would spit an imitation of a mouse to the left side [2].

Let's take the more recent computers. They brought to market the glass screens, backlit keyboard (not sure about this one), webcams with a little light to warn you they are in use (in a notebook), the multi-touch trackpad for scrolling first - the other manufacturers' solution was to waste space on the right side. The vents on the hinge, so the computer won't blow at you or at your desk and its innards are a little bit more protected, the magnetic latch, the first general-purpose notebooks with 6+ hours of battery life, batteries with a button to see its charge without turning the computer on, the transparent metal for the sleep light, the removal of the useless lights/sticks/extra buttons leaving the computer with what it needs, the metal casing, the unibody casing... So they are innovating on engineering, and as far as I see, much more than anyone else.

HP has nice research with memristors. Let's hope they finish it. I would like to see every computer manufacturer bringing so much innovation to their products as Apple does. But for the last 30 years, that's not the case.

So no, you cannot buy similar hardware, when they bring a new thing. You have to wait for hp/asus/whatever to catch up. Besides, the main innovation on the engineering process was made not by the brands themselves, but by the engineering team in east asia (mostly taiwan) who builds the machines for the american companies, like foxconn with desktop chassis for dell/hp/compaq, quanta with notebooks for everyone else, and so on.

Now apple is using stainless steel, too (on the old ipod shuffle and now on the iphone), a new manufacturing process for the glass for the iphone's screen, and that liquidmetal thing. Let's see what they come up with these, and how long it will take for the rest of the market to get up with.

Please correct me where I am wrong.

[1] http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/hardware-hoarders/2009/06/dan-darcys-1993-canon-bj-notebook-bn22.html
[2] http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/cgi-bin/sitewise.pl?act=big&p=3405&pic=2

maybe you should turn testing into a drinking game. Take a shot every time a bug is found. but seriously, you could outsource testing: http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2008/02/15/229432/autistic-people-prove-valuable-in-software-testing.htm

Instead, when a user opens an app they should be asked at the time of access to a resource if it's OK to access that resource. Now here I'm sure you start to be reminded of Vista UAC and innumerable "Are you sure" dialogs. But I don't mean every tine, I mean only once or twice and then the app is granted that permission permanently.

Yes it means that an app could potentially do something later on after being granted some permission. But it also would block a lot of obviously wrong things from working, like opening a media player and then being asked if it's OK to SMS a big ol' number you do not recognize.

You mentioned the shortcomings yourself; this wouldn't stop any serious malware author. They would either wait out whatever "trial period" you impose, or find a clever way to masquerade their malice to seem innocent. With application models like these, you really can't beat around the bush, and solutions that try and mitigate will only find their limits probed, explored, and worked around.

If you have to rely on that, the system will not work. Users don't want to, and will not be "educated" to. They want to buy and use something. You can't make users do something they don't want to, any more than force everyone to carefully listen to the flight attendants on an airline explain the safety procedures beforehand.

Education isn't as impossible as you seem to think it is. It is a compromise between the vendors and the users. I'll use browsers as examples: you'll never get Joe Averageuser to validate SSL certificate roots of trust by clicking through dialogues. You will, however, get very far giving him a simple piece of advice, like check the color of the bar before you use a banking website.

That is what phone OS's need to be designed to do (and they are, hence the "bullshit" in my title). They need to simplify the absurdly-complex system that is a mobile phone down to a manageable set of qualities that everyday users can handle and make intelligent decisions based on. You will always find your idiots, but smart OS / UI design can put the top 99% of people in a position to make the right call, and that's very powerful.

Existing mobile phone UIs certainly have plenty of room to grow, but the vendors understand the psychological and intellectual landscape, and I believe strongly that they are moving in the right direction at a very respectable pace.

There are still plenty of FORTRAN shops out there, or at least legacy FORTRAN applications.

There is a ton of COBOL apps that need maintaining

If you are going to learn anything, it should be stuff that makes you more interesting as a FORTRAN and COBOL coder. For example, get comfortable making HTML/CSS pages. A lot of shops are trying to connect COBOL to the web and SOAP.

Find a web site or book to learn what relational databases are. Everything is relational these days. The NoSQL crowd think they're post-relational, but they still talk in the relational language.

That's the other thing you should learn: Oracle PL/SQL and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). SOA these days means SOAP and message busses. At my place of work, we have a legacy COBOL application that needs to connect to the enterprise's Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). We are struggling to find anyone who can do it inside our company.

Your future is being the bridge between the past and the future. Learn how to make those old apps do new tricks, and you'll make lots of money.

Learn Perl. Because Perl is like the swiss-army knife for programmers. You may not write an application with it, but you might use it to make bulk changes to a hundred COBOL or FORTRAN source files.

I would never drive a car that says, "Before you start your car, there is an important safety update, do you want to install that update or blow it off?"

Bullshit. It's called maintenance, and yes, cars do require it. In fact, it's much more onerous than clicking a few times and call it done - not to mention it's much cheaper.

I guess I'm saying that now that internet access is available via cell technology and wifi and wired devices, and I don't know of anybody that uses a compuer not connected to one of these things, that bandwidth needs to increase and "cloud" or computing as a service needs to become a reality. Sure, nobody trusts these big bad internet companies with their data besides the exceptions like online tax services, online banking, facebook and their ilk, ISPs with their logs and their email, ecommerce, and other random services. But maybe, just maybe in the near future there can be a stable computing platform.

First, I trust third parties with *some* of my data, carefully selected. The "cloud" solution requires you to trust all your data.
Second, trusting everything in the cloud is nice because it never fails.

Seriously, somebody should mod this "Not from Foss" parent down as either deliberate astro-turfing or uninformed.

How could anybody observing the open source portion of the market, or deigning to comment so supposedly authoritatively about this topic, miss articles such as: "Linux is only bright spot as Novell reports loss" http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2009/12/04/239593/Linux-is-only-bright-spot-as-Novell-reports-loss.htm

It's been common knowledge for the past several years that open source companies like RedHat, and the open source portions of companies like Novell, have been among the few bright spots in an otherwise recession market.

... maybe:

http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2009/05/11/235953/Is-the-Microsoft-public-sector-deal-good-value-for-Britain.htm

The article says the retired mainframe is from 1997 so it's almost certainly a G3 or G4-based model.

If it was a G4 then replacing it with a mainframe that wasn't end-of-lifed would have entailed all the complications of migrating mainframe apps from 31-bit to 64-bit that are described in this article http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2003/12/15/199268/mainframe-users-face-upgrade-dilemma.htm.

The article speaks of a "31-bit compatibility mode" in z/OS, but that's a mode that allows it to run on the 31-bit-address/32-bit-data pre-z/Architecture machines. Dropping that would be the equivalent of Windows 8 requiring x86-64 but still running 32-bit apps, or {pick your distribution} dropping its i386 version but still supporting 32-bit apps, or OS X 10.n, for some value of n > 6, running only on x86-64 Macs but still running 32-bit apps, or....

The article also quotes somebody as saying "Migrating in-house applications onto z/OS is almost like Y2K all over again."; I'm not sure what they mean by that - I'd be a little surprised if 32-bit-data/{24,31}-bit-addressing apps didn't largely Just Work on 64-bit z/OS.

The article says the retired mainframe is from 1997 so it's almost certainly a G3 or G4-based model.

If it was a G4 then replacing it with a mainframe that wasn't end-of-lifed would have entailed all the complications of migrating mainframe apps from 31-bit to 64-bit that are described in this article http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2003/12/15/199268/mainframe-users-face-upgrade-dilemma.htm. If it was a G3 then they would have faced even more obstacles...

If you had read the earlier articles on the TradElect fiasco, you would have known that it was basically written and designed by Microsoft itself. Accenture had a very heavy involvement in the project straight from Redmond.

I'd like to see your source for that - all the articles I've read have described the project as in-house, or developed by Accenture with support from Microsoft on the .NET platform.

So yes, this is an outright condemnation of the quality of Microsoft's products.

Except that the CIO of the LSE has gone on record as saying that TradElect saved them from a series of hostile takeovers. Further to that:

The new platform will be based on Linux and Solaris, while TradElect is based on Microsoft's .Net technology. The choice of the latter, which has raised quite a few eyebrows in the market, is defended by Lester. He claims that LSE is coming off TradElect not because of the .Net technology itself (although its trading speed is 2.7 milliseconds compared to Linux-based Chi-X's 0.4 milliseconds), but 'for more control, less costs, and the ability to build and innovate'. Furthermore, he describes LSE's experience with .Net as 'very positive'.

So no, it's not an outright condemnation of the quality of Microsoft's products. It's about switching to a cheaper product that operates more quickly and is more flexible.

Sources: Computer Weekly, IBS Publishing.

No. The open cavity was made by Microsoft. This bloke was a hobo looking for interesting stuff public places.
http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2009/09/22/237807/expert-challenges-ufo-hackers-700k-bill.htm

The US had not taken reasonable steps to protect its security and now expects McKinnon to pick up the bill, said an expert witness statement made in McKinnon's ongoing appeal against a US extradition order. ... But Sommer said, "Every intrusion detection system I have come across would flag up the installation of a remote control program like Remotely Anywhere. Any firewall also ought to block the 'ports' [internet access points on a computer] used by Remotely Anywhere. On this basis, the costs claimed for are features that should have been there in the first place."

http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/20090123/hacker-wins-court-review.htm

McKinnon said he was looking for evidence of Unidentified Flying Objects and was only able to [sic]success because of the lax security.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4715612.stm

"I found out that the US military use Windows," said Mr McKinnon in that BBC interview. "And having realised this, I assumed it would probably be an easy hack if they hadn't secured it properly."

These weren't gated communites or locked houses with security fences around. These were toliet blocks on parks that a hobo went through their garbage bin, then climbed into the ceiling to get to the cleaner cupboard.

Remote Anywhere is a traveling mechanism; while he was there he may have bashed a few locks in... after being invited in, but the incompetent owners and purchasers of well known Operating Sieve MS Windows are to be held more accountable than this twerp.

We don't know what the impact is. Several security holes have been classified as "important" because it's only a DoS, then someone figures out how to exploit it, and all of a sudden it's "critical".

We don't have the source, so we can only trust them. They have a vested interest in making security problems look as innocuous as possible.

I spent 15 mins moderating, then got here and had to post. We can't trust someone with a history of getting it wrong, when that person won't show us proof.

One flaw reclassified (read the first comment):
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2005/11/exploit_for_unpatched_ie_flaw_1.html

Outlook DoS reclassified as remote code execution:
http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2004/03/15/201044/ms-outlook-hole-is-more-serious-than-first-thought.htm

Conficker racked up $9 billion in damages during its first quarter. That's far from the only worm out there. Old windows malware doesn't go away it's just added to the zoo.

Compare that to the estimated development costs for your average linux distro run about $1 billion.

So the savings of eradicating MSFT products for just three months would, using those numbers, give enough money to start linux from scratch 9 times over and still break out even. The more polished linux distros are now quite a few years ahead of Windows in most areas. In the areas they aren't $9 billion could buy a lot of improvement. Of that hypothetical $9 billion, it wouldn't cost but a fraction to make Filezilla as nice as Fugu or cyberduck.

Oh, but wait. There's the long tail of the worm. The windows worms run for years.

Microsoft products just aren't engineered for security. Xp, Vista and Vista 7 show us that nothing changes on that front. That's not a technical problem any more, that's an HR problem. Get rid of the MSFT boosters and you raise productivty.

If the burners were needed during the course of business, it may have been impossible to disable them without costing more in the long run.

I don't see how that could be the case. My work PC is on the UK government intranet and everything is totally locked down. Only certain users are allowed to copy things to CD/DVD or other external media and even then it's locked down to particular machines. That's why that Child Benefit CD fiasco was such a mystery to me; it was eventually pinned on a low grade Admin Officer for failing to send the discs via the correct courier service but you'd have to be pretty senior to have complete access to a database like that and have disc burning privileges.

Anyway, the point is that it definitely is possible to lock down CD burners in a work environment that use them. It was clear from the story that the users weren't meant to be using those burners, however, as otherwise security wouldn't have been called.

The UK Government has now responded and denied that the card can't be hacked http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2009/08/07/237247/id-card-cannot-be-hacked-uk-government-claims-encryption-secrets.htm To be honest I don't believe them

So, when are you going to tell the European Commission they're wrong? When will you tell the US Justice Department and judges they are wrong? Fact is is at least one US and one European court has ruled MS is a monopoly. You may disagree with them but they enjoy the force of law whereas you don't.

Falcon

As early as 2002, I started to half-jokingly tell young co-workers that were asking that they should learn COBOL as a way to insure them a prosperous career. ;-) Back then, most schools were removing or had removed COBOL programming from their course list.

I was half-jokingly telling them that by 2015 they should be earning 150-200K a year as a simple COBOL developer ;-)))

See this article from last year saying basically the same thing :

http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2008/08/07/231774/cobol-programmer-shortage-starts-to-bite.htm

Note: I am to old to start to learn COBOL, this is stuff for young people... ;-)

I seriously doubt microsoft was involved in the development of tradelect. marketing in collaboration with accenture yes.

From an old Computer Weekly article
"Accenture built the Tradelect platform in India between late 2004 and March this year."

And from an old information age article, a classic Quote from the now departed IT Director:
"That was where Microsoft came in. We looked at their whole suite of technology from their development environment through to their databases and operating systems, and we decided that their technology was best aligned to achieving this range of design principles. We also found that they were willing to operate as true partners with us and to engage throughout the whole four-year programme rather than on particular components within it where there was potential revenue for them through licence sales. So we felt that not only did their technology stack up against the design principles, but they were genuinely able to act as a partner. They recognised at the most senior levels what we were trying to achieve here and that was important to us."

That's £40m over a short 2 years of service - work out the TCO on the depreciation cost alone! So, yes, I do think Microsoft has a lot to answer for because they were engaged at the highest levels. Also, Accenture have a lot to answer for. As soon as I saw "India", well, I'm sorry, but it's rare for an offshore project to meet requirements - in the same way that a project for Bank of India outsourced to the UK would probably fail.

It's worth a look at the Chi-X platform sales brochure (it's PPT, how ironic) which is a direct competitor to LSE and uses Linux successfully. Chi-X has about 15% or so of UK FTSE 100 trades. The amazing feature of CHi-X is its low latency - especially in trading where 20 ms is a very long time and can cost principals serious money.

Could you please see this law in perspective for a moment:
1) This law requires the ISP to hold identification data for only 6 months - most ISPs keep it longer than that.

[ citation needed ] Before the data retention directive, this time was limited by the privacy directive. That one specifies that such data may only be kept as long as strictly necessary for billing and general administrative purposes.

Moreover, it's not just about identification data, but also about who emails/calls whom when and from where.

And collecting all of this data costs about £45.8m for the UK according UK government estimates.

2) The only way to have access to this data is to have a court order.

That depends on the Swedish proposed implementation (with which I'm not familiar). The data retention directive mandates nothing of the sort (which was one of the strong points of criticism against it).

in the end we just want our privacy and not make it impossible for police to do their jobs.

The point is that this directive is not required for the police to do their job reasonably well, and that the costs and privacy invasions of the directive are completely disproportionate compared to the potential gains in effectiveness for the police.

The Commission referred in its proposal to exactly one (yes 1) single study on this topic. That one concluded that it was not clear whether or not data retention would help a lot in investigations.

So the big complaints are: no demonstration of necessity, hugely disproportionate, major costs, big dangers of abuse and other negative effects. Of course, in addition to the way it was pushed through.

According to Machiavelli, the problem [...] was that the mercenaries themselves were unreliable and disloyal.

This is totally of topic, but do you read When IT meets politics, It just quoted Machiavelli too. Or is it just a big coincidence?

Privacy. It's your right whether you need/want it or not. Don't give yours away, and I'd appreciate you not giving mine away either.

http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/the-data-trust-blog/2009/02/debunking-a-myth-if-you-have-n.html

And here's Professor Solove's essay on "I've got nothing to hide" and privacy.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565

MS was going to include PDF save capability in Office 2007, but Adobe threatened antitrust action so MS made the PDF and XPS save capability a separate installation.

http://my-tech-tips.blogspot.com/2006/11/adobe-threatens-microsoft-over-office.html

http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2006/06/05/216271/microsoft-drops-pdf-option-after-adobe-threat.htm

So blame Adobe for this lack of ability, its certainly not Microsofts fault...

Some issues are aesthetic. Some, like the failure to support some ancient legacy hardware are forgivable in a forward looking company. Some, like infrequent crashing of Windows Explorer or memory leaks are acceptable under the "all software has bugs" philosophy.

And then there are some that you don't get a Mulligan for. There's no do-over allowed on these because they betray a lack of commitment to good coding practice, validation testing and best network practice that not only has been the industry standard for a decade, but that you committed to years ago and continue to promise since.

The whole of MOD and military is moving to one windows system called DII and it's costing a lot http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2007/11/19/228122/mods-5bn-defence-information-infrastructure-hits-major.htm

From the bottom of the article -

Some of the planned DII technologies

-Computer Associates helpdesk and service catalogue

-Windows XP and Vista

-Proxima BSM business service reporting

-HP Radia software management

-MicroMuse Netcool system management

-Computer Associates Argis system management

-Quest Active Role Server for user setup

-NDL Metascybe Active Conductor for terminal emulation

-HP protect tools; Sanctuary, NAI McAfee for security

-Veritas Netbackup for back-up/clustering

- Verity enterprise search

- Exchange and Boldon James for medium and high grade messaging

- K2.net for workflow

- Microsoft Adam for enterprise directory

Almost an exercise in doing things badly.

The MOD definitely didn't cut expenses. They are spending a hell of a lot installing XP everywhere http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/tony_collins/2008/07/it-defence.html
But then what do you expect when EDS are involved?

SCO has a market cap of just over $3 million. IIRC, McDonald's Corp is one of their major customers. That $3mil is pocket change for the $66.95 billion market cap McD's Corp.

What if McDonald's buys SCO? McD's could hire a couple devs (since that is all SCO needs, apparently..) for maintenance and some support personnel, then service their own stores as well as other existing customers. Maybe they'd wind up saving, if not making, some money in a few years. Perhaps give Darl a store to manage...

Heh. :)

Point being, with a market cap of only $3mil, SCO and anything they have/own are basically chump change for a real corporation. So, if the judges (have) let this happen, then, and I hate to even think of it, we'll see this zombie keep stumbling forward...

The UNIX systems are being replaced (yes, I admit I work at one of the new stores in the US). The new system is NewPOS. http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2008/02/14/229409/mcdonalds-takes-epos-system-in-house.htm It's a Windows Server 2003 environment with Windows XP embedded workstations. So I doubt they'd be interested in SCO.

Lets not forget the American Intelligence has never actually produced any solid evidence linking OBL to Sept 11. If the American government wanted to extradite a British citizen I would expect my government to be presented with an extremely solid case for it. We don't, however, but then the way we just roll over isn't exactly something to be proud of: http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2008/08/28/232007/hacker-gary-mckinnon-loses-extradition-appeal.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natwest_three

I got a reply from Mozilla's newsgroup: "It is a problem of the website styles not accounting for this case - they should at least allow that much of font size variation (while I don't have problem reading even smaller than 12px font, it is extremely not comfortable to me, so I'm using the same minimum)."

I suggest we tell ComputerWeekly about this issue: http://www.computerweekly.com/StaticPages/ContactUs.htm ...

I think I got it now. It's not ABP's fault.

If SeaMonkey's Minimum Font size is set to 12 or higher, then no images show up in Computer Weekly's Image Gallery: http://www.computerweekly.com/Home/GalleryListingPage.aspx ... Example: http://www.computerweekly.com/PhotoGalleries/232923/33_20_BMW-750-IL-Tomorrow-Never-Dies-1997-Pierce-Brosnan.jpg

Are you using that too in Firefox/SeaMonkey?

I think I got it now. It's not ABP's fault.

If SeaMonkey's Minimum Font size is set to 12 or higher, then no images show up in Computer Weekly's Image Gallery: http://www.computerweekly.com/Home/GalleryListingPage.aspx ... Example: http://www.computerweekly.com/PhotoGalleries/232923/33_20_BMW-750-IL-Tomorrow-Never-Dies-1997-Pierce-Brosnan.jpg

Are you using that too in Firefox/SeaMonkey?

I didn't see any on my side too.

I reported the problem to AdBlock Plus people in http://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=21432 ... Other ComputerWeekly's image galleries have the same problem from http://www.computerweekly.com/Home/GalleryListingPage.aspx ...

Image Properties:
Location: http://www.computerweekly.com/PhotoGalleries/232923/19_20_Jet-pack-Thunderball-1965-Sean-Connery.jpg
Location: http://www.computerweekly.com/PhotoGalleries/232923/34_20_Mini-speedboat-The-World-is-Not-Enough-1999-Pierce-Brosnan.jpg
etc...

Image Properties:
Location: http://www.computerweekly.com/PhotoGalleries/232923/19_20_Jet-pack-Thunderball-1965-Sean-Connery.jpg
Location: http://www.computerweekly.com/PhotoGalleries/232923/34_20_Mini-speedboat-The-World-is-Not-Enough-1999-Pierce-Brosnan.jpg
etc...

What about Oddjob's razor-brimmed bowler hat?

What about it? It's #9.

You're absolutely correct. If someone excludes options it means they have their reasons for it, political, imposed policy, vendor goodies or maybe just being nervous to go unchartered waters (in itself not a bad thing as long as it occasionally involved re-evaluation of the underlying decisions).

Plus, the guy may not have the mental strength or clout to get into a battle he can't win because companies are presently as little controlled for their abuse and malfeasance as bank and politicians are (and we know the mess that made).

However, creating Open Source awareness can happen in different ways. You may not want to use it, but it can still form part of your negotiation tactics and missing that trick almost amounts to negligence..

Maybe his job is important, given all these studies showing that we are more at risk than ever. eg The recent report from the Georgia Tech Information Security Centre saying that all our security is way behind what the hackers use.

I read this snippet from Computer Weekly earlier on: - http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/it-downtime-blog/2008/10/microsoft-speech-glitch-raises.html Which pretty much sums up how not to do it!

Hi I am a journalist at Computer Weekly and I have been following the London Stock Exchange going down story. I am trying to get feedback from people affected. Do you think the stock exchange should come clean about exactly what happened technically. I wrote the story below following feedback from various people. thanks karl http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2008/09/10/232269/stock-exchange-told-to-come-clean.htm

Well another poster pointed out this story with a juicy quote:

The stock exchange realised it had a problem at 9.15am this morning and has been working since then to identify and fix the problem.

A source close to the company said an upgrade had gone wrong. The stock exchange would not comment.

I think its all about network latency - ie the marketing machine says 3ms, but they are referring to the time taken to get the message to the stock exchange's switch.

A Computer Weekly article (and its first link) explains it - basically, they replaced the old networks with new fibre-based ones and colocated servers for brokerages.

"The UK's major banks and hundreds of City trading firms will begin testing the London Stock Exchange's new core trading platform early next month, ahead of its planned launch in the summer of 2007 ..

Accenture built the Tradelect platform in India between late 2004 and March this year .. Tradelect .. will rely on high-speed middleware developed in-house, which was created using Microsoft's C# programming language and the .net Framework"

The article here blames it on some sort of botched upgrade.

Which from the sounds of this article http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2008/06/12/231031/agile-trading-software-critical-to-london-stock-exchange.htm was the intent.

One very interesting note is at the end of the article:

Timeline for Tradelect upgrades

18 June 2007: Tradelect launched, reducing the time taken to process trades from 140 milliseconds to 10 milliseconds. Capacity increased from 593 to 2,500 orders a second.

November 2007: Version 2 upgrade. Trading time reduced from 10 milliseconds to about 6 milliseconds. Capacity increased by 70% from 2,500 to 4,200 orders a second. Introduced full suite of Mifid-compliant services.

September 2008: Planned migration of Italian trades to Tradelect platform.

September 2008: Tradelect Version 2 to launch. Plans to double trading capacity to 10,000 continuous messages per second. Aims to cut average time taken to complete a trade by half from 6 milliseconds to 3 milliseconds.

Coincidence that this month was when they intended to release a new version?

http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2006/09/26/218637/city-prepares-to-test-new-trading-platform.htm

I bet the fingers are pointing today - Accenture (formerly Arthur Andersen) India vs HP vs Microsoft.

Bruce Schneier already covered this, first in a 2005-02-11 entry in his blog, and again in a 2008-04-04 essay for ComputerWeekly.

I am absolutely not trying to compare myself to Bruce, but I recognized the weakness of security questions prior to his writings, when I was using his freeware PasswordSafe in 1997. (I've since moved to Keypass... not fucking plaintext Post-it Notes, FFS).

Like Bruce, I've always filled these Q&A fields with 64+ printable ASCII characters via PasswordSafe's/KeyPass's integrated CS-PRNG, which I do not record. When I can provide the question, even better. Two crazy-ass-long fields for an attacker to guess.

It should be obvious, no? A constrained set of questions (2-4 bits of entropy), each with a correspondingly constrained set of answers... ("First make of CAR???" You gotta be fucking kidding me... Why not be done with it, and offer 2kB dictionary downloads for brute-force attackers right on the Lost Password form?) Compare these constraints to a proper, lengthy CS-PRNG alphanumeric pass[word|phrase]... No contest.

It's already happening and has been happening the last 10 years. (You don't suppose the teens growing up have noticed THAT trend, do you?) At first, I wondered if this article was just some propaganda for the, "look--we need more H-1B workers to do the jobs"!

First off it's a survey of non-IT graduates (so who knows what degree they're actually getting, i.e., music appreciation) and less than 10% of the total surveyed felt the "benefits of an IT-based degree had been effectively communicated to them at school." Forget benefits, how about what work they can do with an IT or related degree? I'll bet most think of computer programmer and that's about it.

I think job futures are better communicated today--when I grew up they gave you an aptitude test in high school and you sat with a guidance counselor who probably didn't know any more about the outside world than you did. Now people take their kids to work and companies are getting involved in schools much earlier instead of waiting until you've graduated only to find out there's no jobs in your field or you dislike the work. But at times you don't realize that what you like to do might mesh with a different career choice. More needs to be done on explaining what jobs are out there now, what's likely for the future and what's needed to get there. I know several people when I entered college went into the oil industry which was doing well at the time (late 70s), but by the time they got out, the boom went bust and they had degrees, but no jobs to be found. But that's the nature of that industry. Just like the Internet boom and bust. You've got to find that bleeding edge (especially in technology) and ride it for as long as the wave goes and be able hopefully see what's coming ahead enough to make quick changes when necessary.

Yes, tedious jobs pay the bills, (unless they can hire unskilled, illegal labor to do it!) But I feel to really be a success you must get some joy or satisfaction out of what you do. Otherwise you'll turn into a clock-in, clock-out nimrod who does enough to pay the bills and hope to keep from getting fired.

Ironically, at the bottom in the related links, was the story IT staff wasted on non-strategic 'chores'. Maybe the survey members saw that article!