...freeware/open source developers to shell out $500 for a certificate...
If you can't fix the OS, then charge for certs for it.
It is the next part of MS EEE, MS EEEE. Embrace, extend, exterminate and then extort. Wait until they apply this stuff to music and video encrypting users files...
All this cert stuff when a checksum or PGP signature would have done it. But no money in that.
I hear ya. There is one great part about Vista for Linux users though. All those old XPs will be on sale on perfectly good hardware as many want Vista "capable". Me, I am eyeing up a new AMD X2... juat think of all the patches we don't need to apply!
If you need an immediate answer, why the hell are you resorting to email? There is no reliable way to even be sure that he received your message, let alone that he is going to read it right away or take the time to addesss it.
So for every issue I have to call like a baby sitter? No fraking way. If a chair mushroom does not respond to simple issues appropriatly, I start cc'ing their manager, and then their manager's manager. Maybe include their peers. Even went up to the CEO 6 layers up once, got a good reaction there. I always give them a chance, nicely first, after all everyone gets busy but in the third or fourth response I get political in a way they look like fools if they don't move. Eventually they get trained and responses are good.
For the ones that respond appropriately and promptly, I cc their managers with thanks. It helps weed out chair "mushroom" game players come annual review.
I actually like email politics, especially for forgetful managers looking to swing blame into the wrong places. (No, I don't listen to "retention policies". If I get or send it, I burn it on DVD archives once a quarter).
In todays business, you have to learn email politics.
Mind you, the phone is not dead for complex issues. But not every issue is complex, very few actually.
The "mystery" is where the polution is coming from.
It is also possible the whales, or lack of them play a part. Would say 500 missing whales eat a lot of plankton and algae? This would mean there would not be as much to fall and rot.
Maybe oil from Alaska leaking from old rusty tankers.
Maybe someone saved some disposal costs and dropped in 50 barrels of toxic waste.
I have seen this on interior freshwater lakes where in 1968 the water was clear, fresh and loaded with large and small fish. In 1998 I was back to the same lake in the same place, the loads of algae made it like a slime bog and the fish were scrawny, few and small. The mine shut down in 1996 and some heavy fine laws on human waste going into the lake was enforced and the lake appears to be slowly coming back.
Probably a combination of factors, but mankind is behind most.
Christopher Maxwell, 21, of Vacaville, Calif., was also sentenced to three years of supervised release.
The amount of crime is inversely proportional for the tolerance of the crime. That is, if the punishment for a crime were to be severe enough there would be little of it. Guess with this kind of sentence we can expect more crime.
Me, the local store is selling a AMD 64 X2 w. 2GB RAM AMD, dual layer DVD, 300GB HD, video card with digital and analog outputs with a 19" wide screen flat panel. As far as I can tell, the one I am looking at has workable Linux drivers for all the devices and costs $1000 CDN.
Yes, I used to build, in fact built about 12 systems over the years. You can build them better than you can buy, but not cheaper. It does not seem like you can build them cheaper than you can buy any more.
Even if the CPU never sees XP and runs Linux, I just write off paying Microsoft taxes.
..As such, there is only small chance that i'll even think about using a laptop..
I am much like you, I haven't used my laptop on the plane in over 10 years. I carry it as I don't trust the airline staff not to steal or break it. I wonder if the creators and sponsoring execs of the business venture with on Boeing got fired for not thinking and testing this through before spending that much? My guess is they just moved to another part of Boeing at the first sight of a problem. Now everyone at Boeing gets a pay cut, but management will blame it on the industry.
...cell phones work perfectly well at high altitudes..
They do. It is a common misconception that the authorities want cell phones off in flight because of safety. The reason is simple, because the plane is travelling so fast, and the ground system is more or less designed for automobile speeds, the cell system hands off to the next cell very rapidly causing grief for the cell system owners.
It likely will not work when over an unpopulated area, but near cities and main hiways it should. This isn't to say the connection will be stable, it likely will not be. 9/11 worked because they were in a populated area flying relatively low.
... pc protection companies can't deal with windows actually securing itself.
I heard this too going from Windows 98 to XP. Still waiting. Vista will be no different.
They would actually consider using blackhat techniques instead of the provided methods? They'd be fools, too.
Isn't this exactly what AV and firewalls already do? There is no open easy M$ official way to do any of these security functions is there? Wrapping a DLL here, swapping out a registry entry there isn't much different than a root kit is it? The only difference is the reasoning, one is to prevent further infections.
M$ is finally doing what UNIX/Linux/BSD has enjoyed for many years, user processes should not be able to modify OS stuff! Hurray, M$ finally gets the idea!
But me, I am already into UNIX/Linux/BSD so now that I am hooked, I just laugh at what it really costs to run a Windows platform. My worst problems are 7 year old power supplies dying when I add 500GB of disk or the thunder storm that bounced the power 5 days later.
No one wants to admit life started out there somewhere. For all we know the meteorites seeded life on Earth... and elsewhere. Why is it so hard for people to believe life exists beyond earth? The probabilities and facts dictate the earth is not the center of the universe.
I for one think it would be good for mankind to have a significant first contact with a superior race. At least then we can then look to exploration and not war to keep us occupied while we grow up.
and instead of paying ridiculous prices for AC, they could just pump water from the lake and circulate it.
Or go half way up a mountain in Alaska or Yukon, build a dam near by and A/C would be free for most of the year. We need a little more global warming up here. Easy to police two, just the bear population. Unless they are considered terrorists too?
Brent O. Hatch is one of SCOs many lawyers. One wonders if any part of the new law would be of any help to SCO grabbing the work on many Linux programmers?
I guess the SCO group realizes it has no case so it is now influencing a change in law to change its case. Where is the SEC when you need them? Maybe this explains why SCO gets away with so much.
IBM/Linux should patent 0/1 (binary) since prior art no longer maters. Then countersue. I look at the bright side, the more of a circus they make of the patent system, the sooner it will fall.
Advertising is the primary revenue generator for information content providers. TVs, websites, newspapers, radio, and now computers.
Yep, papers and radio are cheap. Ever look at your cable bill? 120 channels loaded with advertising and they charge you for it. They get away with it because in most places it is a monopoly and the consumer has no choice.
So as long as advertisers give us an option I don't care. The day they try to legislate required advertising I will take my internet connection underground. If advertisers had their way they would embed a A/V chip in your cornea so you would have to watch the crap 7x24 and make us all advert junkies.
Lets look at the RIAA, it isn't good enough to embed adverts and release movies to the public download for free. They want the cable model of advertising where they get paid by both sides. They are resisting what the consumer wants. Guess what, they are loosing. More an more we see what we want, when we want and how we want (mp3/4).
Fortunately, the internet was born free and in my life time advertisers will not see this power.
I'd like to see executive compensation tracked across executives (not companies!) over time in a fixed-effects regression. Then we would know conclusively whether CEOs were being rewarded for poor performance or not, and it would be as easy to do as the cited study.
I would like to include members of the board as well. Also add in problems that occur after they have left that are related to their term, such as aquistions gone bad, expenses logged as sales etc.
And if your taking bets, I would bet those on CxOs on the lower middle end of salaries do the best.
In the absence of your good suggestion being a comprehensive tangeble reality of tracking performance, I generally look to see how much of personal cash directors, executives and CxO's invest of their own in the companies they run. When I see the CEO, CFO and directors dump 10 million in a few days before on a "planned" sale and 3 weeks before the quarter, I too dump them.
A poorly performing company with little future will only be able to hire and retain top management by throwing money at them. No savvy CxO wants a sunk ship on his resume.
So why not go into the trenches and grab someone normal who has company spirit, a good track record in business results and not gamble on a professional self centered CEO that is so full of BS. People near the bottom are used to getting results and not having to BS it up. If you grabbed a senior underpaid tech that invests in the stock market he probably knows more about how to read financials than the CxO. People at the bottom know who at the top are lard asses.
Lets look at a case in point, NorTel. They get Paul Stern, the turning point of a good company. This PhD butt kissing puke ran down other companies before starting NorTel but nonetheless the board hired him all the same. His hype was known to all and in the technical ranks and we all knew he was an ass hole and quite "out to lunch". He walked away after 4 years of disastrous service with just under a million a year from the company pension plan. Which by the way is being reduced today for grunt workers as it was under funded by the board's stupid expensive CEO choices. And if you quadrupled the grunts wages, he would do it for much less than a million and be so happy about it.
Where the real problem is in the board of directors. Hand picked "good boy" professional butt kissers picking the "good-boy"s. They deal in favors and dysfunctional politics and little to do with the company's development. They spend so very little time on profitability, integrity and tangible results they waste shareholders money and often bankrupt companies by giving too little constructive direction.
This is why new startups, those not built on hype and "quick" bucks tend to succeed. Looking back, Ray Noorda (Novell), Bill Gates (Microsoft), Stanford students (Sun) and Steve Jobs (Apple). None of which had a million dollar salary in their prime. It is when MBA's and controlling direction each company hit their zenith. Or when the founders decided it was work, no longer the lust of life or left then the companies went south.
With more and more announcements like these, does anyone else think it is inevitable that Linux will overtake Microsoft on all bases one day?
Eventually, but it will take much time because of the unwillingness to change by many. Ousting the incumbent is hard, as they are known quantity. But Microsoft is loosing market share in some big markets like China. And in the appliance market it is more likely to have a Linux or BSD variant inside. Take for example any common wireless router, it probably runs Linux.
Time is against Microsoft dominance for two reasons. People drive OSes and the more people that know the OS the more viable it becomes. As more people know Linux, the less edge Microsoft has. Second, in places in the world with large populations Microsoft will not get $1000 per desktop so they either pirate it or use Linux. This also adds to popularity but also drives the cost of software down and down. The Microsoft model for software is ever increasing costs, which is against the industry norm. A collision with reality is inevitable for Microsoft. The question should be how long will this take? Microsoft BS of market share are best taken in the context of the USA and not the world.
Perhaps the long-term strategies of Fiorina and the short-term management of Hurd have paid off. A joint effort...
Or do you mean Fiorina did the dirty work so Hurd could take the credit?
It takes years for the impact of a CEO/Chairperson to make a difference unless the books are cooked or the whole VP staff is replaced. In fact I am following one such company now and it is just showing improvements after 2 years and at least 1/2 of the executive staff were replaced.
Merging companies properly is risky, HP->Compaq->Digital was a big gamble and a questionable payout. But HP lost it's organic growth, so if this was Fiorina's reason, it was a good one. Just look at NorTel, they tried a buying binge with Paul Stern and successors. And they still have not recovered to this day.
The asteroid has already passed at 04:44 GMT across North America
Shaved past North America is closer to the point. 268,873 miles is nothing in cosmic terms and no doubt close enough for earths magenetic field to influence it. This was a close call.
Not a bad deal. I'm sure Google will end up paying him for the 1 year vacation.
It really shouldn't be that way. If a company can stick a no-compete on you, then it is they that should have to pay you during the period that you cannot work in your profession. And if you do not have a job at the end of that period, they still should pay you up to two times the length of the clause.
So if you work for a company, and have a 1 year no compete, they might have to pay you up to two years. The US and Canada being at will employment should work both ways equally.
In a nutshell, companies are incented to provide weak security, because including stronger security means loss of revenues and decreased profits.
I beg to disagree with this on 2 points.
First, more secure systems tend to run more efficiently and more reliably, thus increasing the users productivity. As you will not have to deal with your order entry being down for an hour on a crash or patch. More secure systems tend to be run by more knowledgeable staff, better planning, better management and a better choice of applications. Applications that are insecure are also tend to be unreliable, require higher "handholding" and service levels to keep running that increase costs. Over my years of experience, assessing security is a good way to generally assess products fitness for use and over all cost of ownership. Less secure products also tend to cost more to maintain.
Second, security is also about enabling the business to function efficiently. A case in point with employee access control (proxies) and QoS. Corporate I/T gets a call from the manager a major distribution center that they can't process shipments fast enough. So security investigated to find the telnet/ssh traffic for the business applications was competing on the WAN with video porn. Here is the kicker, of 3 video streams; one was going to that very same manager who called! Firing the manager, placing QoS and site filtering on the proxies increased the company's efficiencies. Positive impacts also include a lower risk of sexual harassment and increased customer service levels, with a nice byproduct of better profits.
So it might be more correct to say many companies perceive that security costs are not worth the investment and do not contribute to the bottom line. However, more often than not it is a misguided as many companies have gone bankrupt because their security practices were insufficient.
The biggest problem in security today is getting a rational and logical assessment of how much you should spend, and what you should spend it on. Sales people are liars, yet often management s most trusted source. But this is a I/T industry problem in general.
Why wasn't the content of the harddrive encrypted?
I might submit, why was it on a hard drive at all!
They are looking at 125 pounds machine to erase hard drives. But if you had 32 pounds (a lot) of volitile RAM backed up with 2 6 pound batteries all you would have to do is pull both the power cables or flick a switch. You could also put remote control into it in case the plane went down and they didn't get a chance to execute it's destruction.
I wonder if someone at MS is feeling just a bit stupid right now. Yeah yeah, £65mil is chump change to them, but they do leave with a substantial amount of egg on their face!
This could acutally be very bad for Microsoft. Very little of MS-Windows is genuine. Most is borrowed, bought or infringed from other sources. Microsoft could dye with a 1000 cuts.
Slashdot Mirror
If you can't fix the OS, then charge for certs for it.
It is the next part of MS EEE, MS EEEE. Embrace, extend, exterminate and then extort. Wait until they apply this stuff to music and video encrypting users files...
All this cert stuff when a checksum or PGP signature would have done it. But no money in that.
Linux - Live Free Of DRM
I moved to Linux a few years ago and ....
I hear ya. There is one great part about Vista for Linux users though. All those old XPs will be on sale on perfectly good hardware as many want Vista "capable". Me, I am eyeing up a new AMD X2 ... juat think of all the patches we don't need to apply!
Virus infested spyware trojans adware != Linux
If you need an immediate answer, why the hell are you resorting to email? There is no reliable way to even be sure that he received your message, let alone that he is going to read it right away or take the time to addesss it.
So for every issue I have to call like a baby sitter? No fraking way. If a chair mushroom does not respond to simple issues appropriatly, I start cc'ing their manager, and then their manager's manager. Maybe include their peers. Even went up to the CEO 6 layers up once, got a good reaction there. I always give them a chance, nicely first, after all everyone gets busy but in the third or fourth response I get political in a way they look like fools if they don't move. Eventually they get trained and responses are good.
For the ones that respond appropriately and promptly, I cc their managers with thanks. It helps weed out chair "mushroom" game players come annual review.
I actually like email politics, especially for forgetful managers looking to swing blame into the wrong places. (No, I don't listen to "retention policies". If I get or send it, I burn it on DVD archives once a quarter).
In todays business, you have to learn email politics.
Mind you, the phone is not dead for complex issues. But not every issue is complex, very few actually.
The "mystery" is where the polution is coming from.
It is also possible the whales, or lack of them play a part. Would say 500 missing whales eat a lot of plankton and algae? This would mean there would not be as much to fall and rot.
Maybe oil from Alaska leaking from old rusty tankers.
Maybe someone saved some disposal costs and dropped in 50 barrels of toxic waste.
I have seen this on interior freshwater lakes where in 1968 the water was clear, fresh and loaded with large and small fish. In 1998 I was back to the same lake in the same place, the loads of algae made it like a slime bog and the fish were scrawny, few and small. The mine shut down in 1996 and some heavy fine laws on human waste going into the lake was enforced and the lake appears to be slowly coming back.
Probably a combination of factors, but mankind is behind most.
Christopher Maxwell, 21, of Vacaville, Calif., was also sentenced to three years of supervised release.
The amount of crime is inversely proportional for the tolerance of the crime. That is, if the punishment for a crime were to be severe enough there would be little of it. Guess with this kind of sentence we can expect more crime.
Yep, prices went up when building your own.
Me, the local store is selling a AMD 64 X2 w. 2GB RAM AMD, dual layer DVD, 300GB HD, video card with digital and analog outputs with a 19" wide screen flat panel. As far as I can tell, the one I am looking at has workable Linux drivers for all the devices and costs $1000 CDN.
Yes, I used to build, in fact built about 12 systems over the years. You can build them better than you can buy, but not cheaper. It does not seem like you can build them cheaper than you can buy any more.
Even if the CPU never sees XP and runs Linux, I just write off paying Microsoft taxes.
I am much like you, I haven't used my laptop on the plane in over 10 years. I carry it as I don't trust the airline staff not to steal or break it. I wonder if the creators and sponsoring execs of the business venture with on Boeing got fired for not thinking and testing this through before spending that much? My guess is they just moved to another part of Boeing at the first sight of a problem. Now everyone at Boeing gets a pay cut, but management will blame it on the industry.
They do. It is a common misconception that the authorities want cell phones off in flight because of safety. The reason is simple, because the plane is travelling so fast, and the ground system is more or less designed for automobile speeds, the cell system hands off to the next cell very rapidly causing grief for the cell system owners.
It likely will not work when over an unpopulated area, but near cities and main hiways it should. This isn't to say the connection will be stable, it likely will not be. 9/11 worked because they were in a populated area flying relatively low.
I heard this too going from Windows 98 to XP. Still waiting. Vista will be no different.
They would actually consider using blackhat techniques instead of the provided methods? They'd be fools, too.
Isn't this exactly what AV and firewalls already do? There is no open easy M$ official way to do any of these security functions is there? Wrapping a DLL here, swapping out a registry entry there isn't much different than a root kit is it? The only difference is the reasoning, one is to prevent further infections.
M$ is finally doing what UNIX/Linux/BSD has enjoyed for many years, user processes should not be able to modify OS stuff! Hurray, M$ finally gets the idea!
But me, I am already into UNIX/Linux/BSD so now that I am hooked, I just laugh at what it really costs to run a Windows platform. My worst problems are 7 year old power supplies dying when I add 500GB of disk or the thunder storm that bounced the power 5 days later.
No one wants to admit life started out there somewhere. For all we know the meteorites seeded life on Earth... and elsewhere. Why is it so hard for people to believe life exists beyond earth? The probabilities and facts dictate the earth is not the center of the universe.
I for one think it would be good for mankind to have a significant first contact with a superior race. At least then we can then look to exploration and not war to keep us occupied while we grow up.
and instead of paying ridiculous prices for AC, they could just pump water from the lake and circulate it.
Or go half way up a mountain in Alaska or Yukon, build a dam near by and A/C would be free for most of the year. We need a little more global warming up here. Easy to police two, just the bear population. Unless they are considered terrorists too?
Brent O. Hatch is one of SCOs many lawyers. One wonders if any part of the new law would be of any help to SCO grabbing the work on many Linux programmers?
If Wikipedia is right: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orrin_Hatch
Mod parent UP as the post is on to something.
I guess the SCO group realizes it has no case so it is now influencing a change in law to change its case. Where is the SEC when you need them? Maybe this explains why SCO gets away with so much.
IBM/Linux should patent 0/1 (binary) since prior art no longer maters. Then countersue. I look at the bright side, the more of a circus they make of the patent system, the sooner it will fall.
A close of $2.28 means the stock has lost about 98% of it's value over the last 7 years.
Sounds like NorTel without the stock split.
But the same applies, you would have been better to buy beer as you get to drink it and the empties are worth more.
Advertising is the primary revenue generator for information content providers. TVs, websites, newspapers, radio, and now computers.
Yep, papers and radio are cheap. Ever look at your cable bill? 120 channels loaded with advertising and they charge you for it. They get away with it because in most places it is a monopoly and the consumer has no choice.
So as long as advertisers give us an option I don't care. The day they try to legislate required advertising I will take my internet connection underground. If advertisers had their way they would embed a A/V chip in your cornea so you would have to watch the crap 7x24 and make us all advert junkies.
Lets look at the RIAA, it isn't good enough to embed adverts and release movies to the public download for free. They want the cable model of advertising where they get paid by both sides. They are resisting what the consumer wants. Guess what, they are loosing. More an more we see what we want, when we want and how we want (mp3/4).
Fortunately, the internet was born free and in my life time advertisers will not see this power.
I'd like to see executive compensation tracked across executives (not companies!) over time in a fixed-effects regression. Then we would know conclusively whether CEOs were being rewarded for poor performance or not, and it would be as easy to do as the cited study.
I would like to include members of the board as well. Also add in problems that occur after they have left that are related to their term, such as aquistions gone bad, expenses logged as sales etc.
And if your taking bets, I would bet those on CxOs on the lower middle end of salaries do the best.
In the absence of your good suggestion being a comprehensive tangeble reality of tracking performance, I generally look to see how much of personal cash directors, executives and CxO's invest of their own in the companies they run. When I see the CEO, CFO and directors dump 10 million in a few days before on a "planned" sale and 3 weeks before the quarter, I too dump them.
A poorly performing company with little future will only be able to hire and retain top management by throwing money at them. No savvy CxO wants a sunk ship on his resume.
So why not go into the trenches and grab someone normal who has company spirit, a good track record in business results and not gamble on a professional self centered CEO that is so full of BS. People near the bottom are used to getting results and not having to BS it up. If you grabbed a senior underpaid tech that invests in the stock market he probably knows more about how to read financials than the CxO. People at the bottom know who at the top are lard asses.
Lets look at a case in point, NorTel. They get Paul Stern, the turning point of a good company. This PhD butt kissing puke ran down other companies before starting NorTel but nonetheless the board hired him all the same. His hype was known to all and in the technical ranks and we all knew he was an ass hole and quite "out to lunch". He walked away after 4 years of disastrous service with just under a million a year from the company pension plan. Which by the way is being reduced today for grunt workers as it was under funded by the board's stupid expensive CEO choices. And if you quadrupled the grunts wages, he would do it for much less than a million and be so happy about it.
Where the real problem is in the board of directors. Hand picked "good boy" professional butt kissers picking the "good-boy"s. They deal in favors and dysfunctional politics and little to do with the company's development. They spend so very little time on profitability, integrity and tangible results they waste shareholders money and often bankrupt companies by giving too little constructive direction.
This is why new startups, those not built on hype and "quick" bucks tend to succeed. Looking back, Ray Noorda (Novell), Bill Gates (Microsoft), Stanford students (Sun) and Steve Jobs (Apple). None of which had a million dollar salary in their prime. It is when MBA's and controlling direction each company hit their zenith. Or when the founders decided it was work, no longer the lust of life or left then the companies went south.
The big problems are in the board room.
With more and more announcements like these, does anyone else think it is inevitable that Linux will overtake Microsoft on all bases one day?
Eventually, but it will take much time because of the unwillingness to change by many. Ousting the incumbent is hard, as they are known quantity. But Microsoft is loosing market share in some big markets like China. And in the appliance market it is more likely to have a Linux or BSD variant inside. Take for example any common wireless router, it probably runs Linux.
Time is against Microsoft dominance for two reasons. People drive OSes and the more people that know the OS the more viable it becomes. As more people know Linux, the less edge Microsoft has. Second, in places in the world with large populations Microsoft will not get $1000 per desktop so they either pirate it or use Linux. This also adds to popularity but also drives the cost of software down and down. The Microsoft model for software is ever increasing costs, which is against the industry norm. A collision with reality is inevitable for Microsoft. The question should be how long will this take? Microsoft BS of market share are best taken in the context of the USA and not the world.
Perhaps the long-term strategies of Fiorina and the short-term management of Hurd have paid off. A joint effort...
Or do you mean Fiorina did the dirty work so Hurd could take the credit?
It takes years for the impact of a CEO/Chairperson to make a difference unless the books are cooked or the whole VP staff is replaced. In fact I am following one such company now and it is just showing improvements after 2 years and at least 1/2 of the executive staff were replaced.
Merging companies properly is risky, HP->Compaq->Digital was a big gamble and a questionable payout. But HP lost it's organic growth, so if this was Fiorina's reason, it was a good one. Just look at NorTel, they tried a buying binge with Paul Stern and successors. And they still have not recovered to this day.
The asteroid has already passed at 04:44 GMT across North America
Shaved past North America is closer to the point. 268,873 miles is nothing in cosmic terms and no doubt close enough for earths magenetic field to influence it. This was a close call.
Not a bad deal. I'm sure Google will end up paying him for the 1 year vacation.
It really shouldn't be that way. If a company can stick a no-compete on you, then it is they that should have to pay you during the period that you cannot work in your profession. And if you do not have a job at the end of that period, they still should pay you up to two times the length of the clause.
So if you work for a company, and have a 1 year no compete, they might have to pay you up to two years. The US and Canada being at will employment should work both ways equally.
In a nutshell, companies are incented to provide weak security, because including stronger security means loss of revenues and decreased profits.
I beg to disagree with this on 2 points.
First, more secure systems tend to run more efficiently and more reliably, thus increasing the users productivity. As you will not have to deal with your order entry being down for an hour on a crash or patch. More secure systems tend to be run by more knowledgeable staff, better planning, better management and a better choice of applications. Applications that are insecure are also tend to be unreliable, require higher "handholding" and service levels to keep running that increase costs. Over my years of experience, assessing security is a good way to generally assess products fitness for use and over all cost of ownership. Less secure products also tend to cost more to maintain.
Second, security is also about enabling the business to function efficiently. A case in point with employee access control (proxies) and QoS. Corporate I/T gets a call from the manager a major distribution center that they can't process shipments fast enough. So security investigated to find the telnet/ssh traffic for the business applications was competing on the WAN with video porn. Here is the kicker, of 3 video streams; one was going to that very same manager who called! Firing the manager, placing QoS and site filtering on the proxies increased the company's efficiencies. Positive impacts also include a lower risk of sexual harassment and increased customer service levels, with a nice byproduct of better profits.
So it might be more correct to say many companies perceive that security costs are not worth the investment and do not contribute to the bottom line. However, more often than not it is a misguided as many companies have gone bankrupt because their security practices were insufficient.
The biggest problem in security today is getting a rational and logical assessment of how much you should spend, and what you should spend it on. Sales people are liars, yet often management s most trusted source. But this is a I/T industry problem in general.
And what many of us do is wait until we are in the states and buy them there.
Do they not aleady get a cut on the internet access (cable or DSL)? Is this not double taxation?
Why wasn't the content of the harddrive encrypted?
I might submit, why was it on a hard drive at all!
They are looking at 125 pounds machine to erase hard drives. But if you had 32 pounds (a lot) of volitile RAM backed up with 2 6 pound batteries all you would have to do is pull both the power cables or flick a switch. You could also put remote control into it in case the plane went down and they didn't get a chance to execute it's destruction.
Just another poorly thought out security plan.
I wonder if someone at MS is feeling just a bit stupid right now. Yeah yeah, £65mil is chump change to them, but they do leave with a substantial amount of egg on their face!
This could acutally be very bad for Microsoft. Very little of MS-Windows is genuine. Most is borrowed, bought or infringed from other sources. Microsoft could dye with a 1000 cuts.