If one flips a bit in a file, is it "easy" to find a correcting bit flip(s) that returns the file to its old hash value? If so, can one create a slightly modified copy of a file by flipping the bits one wants changed and then doing a series of counterflips (in an unused part of the file) to "undo" the effects of the nefarious change?
Although terrorists might be able to build a bomb they can probably only build a, as in one, bomb. They are unlikely to be able to build and deploy many bombs. That is why one of the best defenses is to create a more distributed economic infrastructure.
I fear that NYC is a dangerous single-point-of-failure waiting to happen. Decentralizing the economic might of the country (reducing the number of company HQs in NYC and relocating financial networks to outlying areas) would reduce the magnitude of any event.
We already have most of the marketing executives in NYC, now if we could only convince the telephone sanitizers to move there.....
On the flip side, tobacco has provided a bittersweet, if belated, revenge for Native Americans on those who "discovered" America ("you gave us smallpox, we gave you tobacco -- look who's dying now...")
A friend with a cafe looked into "free WiFi" and discovered that telecom companies love to ream businesses. Yes, residential DSL was about $30/mo, but for businesses it was at least $100/month for low-end DSL (256kbps), more if you wanted decent bandwidth.
The study posts the "days of risk" defined as the time between announcement of a vulnerability and the availability of a patch. But this definition misses two big factors. First, there will be some number of days between the discovery of the vulnerability and the announcement of it. Second, there will be some number of days between the patch being available and the downloading of it. Both factors increase the days of risk and mean that a quickly-patch OS with lots of holes has higher practical risk than an slowly-patched OS with few holes.
I don't know which OS has more risks, has a greater delay between discovery and announcement, or has a greater delay between patch availability and patch application. Does MS or Linux get more slack from vulnerability finders? Do MS or Linux admins patch faster? DOes MS or Linux get more vulnerabilities? These data points would help evaluate the true risk.
It may not be "commercial", but OSS is more complete than its proprietary competition. All jokes about self-documenting code aside, I'd rather have access to the source code than to some vendor's documentation of what they think their code does. Seeing inside the box is useful when an API contains undocumented "features."
I fear that authors/editors would withdraw from Wikipedia if it were under the arm (or in the iron-fist) of a for-profit company. If these people felt like Google was profiting on the backs of their freely-contributed content, these content creators would leave and the Wiki would whither for lack of fresh/updated content. Donating time so that other may profit does not seem likely.
What is interesting is that Amazon makes this work. The company is clearly a for-profit entity. Yet its crown jewels are the volunteer-created book reviews. I'm not sure what makes this work. It might be that friends-of-authors are motivated to post glowing reviews, it might be that people who disliked the book are motivated to post scathing reviews, it might be that some reviewers simply like to publish, or all of the above. Perhaps Wiki/Google-pedia could borrow this model to mix free-labor with for-profit.
Looking further into the future on an alternate path, I wonder if Googlepedia could become a fully for-profit (or at least self-sufficient) professionally run and staffed encyclopedia. With micro-royalties to authors/editors (and moderation-based revocation of payments for "bad" content), the organization would attract content creators on a for-pay basis. This aligns the motivational underpinnings of the organization with those of the content creators. The current Wikipedia is for-free people creating for-free content. A future Googlepedia could by for-pay people creating for-pay content.
One overriding lesson from Wikipedia (and Slashdot for that matter) is the ultimate necessity of sources of hard currency for online sites. As long as something is small (and below a certain scale of popularity) it can survive on donated hardware, bandwidth, or the benevolence of a monied patron (someone who pays the hosting bills out-of-pocket). But once it reaches a certain scale, the cost of serious server power, bandwidth, and professional administrators pushes the budget far beyond the hobby scale. Although pleas for donations can help, I suspect large-scale sites must, ultimately, turn to ads, tie-in product sales, and subscriptions.
What is fascinating, in a long-term trend sense, is that the cost of scale are steadily declining. Cheaper hardware, declining bandwidth costs, and improvements in systems management tools mean that sites can reach ever-larger scales before generating prohibitive burn rates on costs. The number of visitors that a hobbyist/free-site can support continues to rise. Perhaps Wike need only wait for the singularity point when the cost to reach (and serve packets to) the entire world is within the reach of a home-grown, volunteer-run organization.
First, in both cases, an expensive asset is provided at less than cost (software code or razor handle).
Nope, a Linux CD sells for about a dollar, and that's about what it costs to manufacture.
And, if a person downloads Linux of someother OSS, how much do they pay? Bandwidth may be cheap, but it is not free.
I'm sorry my post was not clear, but I was speaking of more than just the cost-to-copy. I was speaking of the total cost to provide the code. The full cost to provide a million copies of Linux (if a private company were to attempt to recreate Linux all by itself) is much greater than the cost of a million blank CDs. It includes the effective cost of all the "free" labor contributed by OSS coders (the resources required to create that first copy). If Open Source can be a business model, it must find some way to reward or motivate those who contribute their time to the original creation of the open source good.
The point is that full cost to provide something includes both the cost-to-copy (variable costs) and the cost to create that first copy or to create/maintain the infrastructure (fixed costs). If an enterprise cannot find a way to amortize its fixed costs across its activities, it will go bankrupt.
It seems to me that the core of the open source business model is not that different from Gillette's razor-blade model. There are three parallels. First, in both cases, an expensive asset is provided at less than cost (software code or razor handle). Second, the same people that create the asset also offer some service or consumable (software customization/support or razor blades). Third, the enterprise then thrives on revenue from supporting the use of the freely provided asset
Admittedly, there are large differences between OSS and Gillette. The first set of differences are interrelated and driven by the cost of delivering a copy of the asset to the customer. Gillette faces a high cost of creating razor handles. Thus, it must create captive customers who are forced to buy blades. With OSS, the low cst of copies (the cost of download) means that OSS can tolerate a very high percentage of leaches (customers that take the free stuff and never pay for support or contribute). The ability to tolerate of leaches is a key prerequisite for Open Source.
Another similarity between OSS and Gillette is that both create (to varying degrees) an ecosystem that allows for enhancements to the core asset (e,g., add-on utilities for OSS or additional cobranded products for shaving). The fact that the core asset creates a hub for value attracts additional resources and additional customers in a virtuous circle.
Of course one key difference between OSS and Gillette is in the creation of the original core asset. Gillette pays a very large sum up-front to design the system, build the factories, and create the product (Gillette spent $1 billion to create the Mach III and 2.5 billion to create the Sensor). OSS pays "nothing" to its developers in the pre-launch phase.
The reason this works for OSS is two-fold. First, the cost of the core asset (the codebase) is almost entirely in labor. The ubiquity and low-cost of computers means that anyone can become a developer. This works because people seem psychologicaly more likely to donate time rather than money (a developer might spend 20 hours week on an OSS project at nights and on weekends, but would never consider donating 50% of a years salary to the project). Second, the very same people who donate their time to create the codebase have some hope of reward from the follow-on processes (customization and support) -- for Gillette the person the makes the handle is different from the person the make the blade.
Based on this, I would say the Open Source applies to endevours that have the following characteristics:
Low cost of copy of some core asset
Some potential for process-related revenues for use of the asset (customization, support, subcriptions, consumables, etc.)
Labor-dominated cost of asset creation
Interchangeable labor between the asset-creation and consumable/support sales process
Even with CBC, I still see a vulnerability. If you inject a pattern in the file with foreknowledge that it will be encrypted with a CBC system, then you can probably influence both the encrypted pattern of bits on the output of the first block and the injected pattern of bits on the second block to create a knowable pattern of encrypted bits on the second block. Repeat as needed to propagate some detectable pattern all the way through. I suspect that stream cyphers might be susceptible to this too based on similar arguments. I suppose the encrypter could permute the blocks, pad them, or munge the data to break this, but I do wonder.
The key is that the MPAA has full access to the original file -- they are the creator of the file, after all. Also, the MPAA does not need to break the key or even reconstruct the file. They only need to determine, to some judicial court-decided level of probability, that the file is suspicious and provides probable cause of investigation. That seems like a condition not considered by traditional cypto proofs. Its like the fast Miller-Rabin algorithm that can detect prime numbers with some probability - it can't prove a massive number is prime, but it can make someone confident that it is.
Admittedly, file sharers could just create a moving target -- using one crypto method for a few weeks and then switching methods once the MPAA change the crypto-leaking fingerprint. This turns the system in to an arms race with the speed of designing, building, and installing the algorithms being the determining factor for victory.
I wonder if these fingerprints can be designed to be detectable in an encrypted file? Given that the MPAA knows the pattern of the data itself (the music) and the fingerprint, it seems possble that ghosts of that known data would be detectable in the encrypted data. I remember a cautionary tale of encrypting images with a particular implementation of DES. If the image contained large expanses of pixels of an indentical value, the outline of the image appeared in the bits of the DES-encrypted output.
Although good encrytion should make it impossible to recover unknown bits in the original file, it seems to make no gaurantees that one can't detect the presense of known data (of a sufficiently clever pattern) in the encrypted file.
IANAC, so any expert comments about why known data is made irreversibly invisible by encryption would be appreciated
As much as I, personally, do not like them or their products, I doubt that Microsoft is going away anytime soon or anytime at all. Too many people have invested too much money and time in the MSFT platform. Moreover, MSFT's biggest weakness (security) is not unique to them.
Regardless of the bad architecture decisions unique to Window's, all platforms are vulnerable. This existence of any security weakness in other platforms (even if quantitatively smaller) is used as rationale for staying with "the devil you know."
But the real core of the problem is deeper than any one exploit or architecture mistake. The core problem with security is that the "bad" guys are, in many ways, more motivated than the "good" guys. On the one hand you have the black-hat hacker/spammer/spyware creator/ crime syndicate that is sure that they can make a potload of money off any little crack in a computer's security. Thus, they are highly motivated to search for any flaw and exploit that flaw in however many millions of machines they can reach. On the other hand you have millions of users that don't think that they will have a security problem and thousands of programmers who think their code (or at least their job) is secure. Thus neither the programmers nor the users are as motivated to create security and the bad guys are motivated to defeat security. Thus, the global resources devoted to cracking computers exceeds the local resources to securing computers. Thus all computers have holes and MSFT is unlikely to die because Windows is somehow uniquely insecure.
At worst/best I see Windows slipping to 50%? marketshare before MSFT throws more programmer-hours at security than the entire OSS community could ever hope to muster. With enough of the proverbial monkeys at keyboards, MSFT will regain the security crown or at least through enough marketing dollars to claim it. Morevoer, as Windows loses marketshare, the black hats will attack other platforms. People will soon realize that the new non-Microsoft software is really not that much better than the old stuff and go back to MSFT. At best (for Microsoft's foes), the world will reach some equilibrium point of Windows, Linux, Macintosh, and other platforms.
At $15-100 per click-through,/. might do quite a bit of damage to some lawyer's wallet. I assume the ads have limits on total numbers, but I'd bet that most of the click-happy people that follow these links won't be actual clients for asbestos litigation.
We get average of at least one Washington Mutual phishing email per day and have absolutely no affiliation with the company. Its definitely the most popular phishing target (more popular than paypal or ebay in our little back water of the IP space). I don't know if WaMu is especially phish-easy, but they seem to be a strong target.
I was at a knowledge management conference where someone talked about how knowledge workers spend their time. A study of Microsoft software developers uncovered that they spent 75% of their day using Outlook. I kid you not!
Although timely communications and collaboration are essential to massive distributed development projects, I wonder about the human capacity to prioritize and handle the barrage of incoming communications created by e-mail, IM, etc. I wonder if companies could create scoped-communication tools that intentionally filter and limit connectivity to some "optimal" level.
So now, someone is *PAYING* the sales person in that store to show customers products by Dior everytime they ask to see your products. If you were Louis Vuitton you would not be happy about that.
This is no different than the practice of spiffs or push money to motivate the sales force to sell a particular product. I agree that it is not pleasant for the maker (and may be unethical toward the consumer), but paying the retailer for favored position, promotion, etc. is widespread.
If I search for 'Louis Vuitton' then I only want to see search results for Louis Vuitton.
Then you and I are different in our search habits. I sometimes use a brand name that I know as a convenient term to find hits in a category (especially to find reviews of products in the category or retailers in the category). Category terms are sometimes harder to create and more ambiguous then brand names. Perhaps Google needs a search modifier or preference to distinguish between "strict" (your style) and "loose" (my style) of searches.
If I go to a store and ask for "Louis Vuitton" is it trademark infringement if the sales person also shows me Dior or some other maker's products? I would argue that as long as Google's ads do not mislead the user into thinking that the link is for "Louis Vuitton" then it is no different than a store clerk showing me a competing good.
All Google is doing is recognizing that people use specific terms to represent generic actions. I may search for "Louis Vuitton" but really intend to look at luxury goods of a wide range of makers -- the trademark name is only being used to find hits in the category. As long as the ads don't pretend to offer something they don't (bait and switch), I would argue that Google is serving the purpose of search.
For the price of one shuttle launch, NASA could offer a very hefty, very inviting prize to private companies that can deliver a suitable payload to orbit and the ISS. NASA might offer some more modest sub-prizes for lesser accomplishments (e.g., delivering a small crew with no payload to ISS).
Although cutting costs is a fine idea, your IT department may be able to help the rest of the company deliver more top-line and bottom-line growth. You might want to think about how IT can help the sales-force be more productive, help ensure that customers get what they want, help employees keep working, help managers see the big picture, etc.
I'd think about (and document) how you can add value, not just cut costs.
Call me a curmudgeon, but it seems like most of the heat is created by wasted cpu cycles. Eye candy is nice, but at 200 million computers in the U.S. alone, each Watt saved represents about $31 million in annual energy costs (assuming 40 hrs/wk, @ $0.074/kWHr. Reducing power consumption by 10 W would pay for a lot of good beer to fuel software development for more efficient software.
Fans may not be able to muster the xx million for a physical production of the show, but what about a lower-cost CGI version? Fans could contribute CPU cycles for rendering the show. And some fans could even help in creating episodes by creating 3-D models of the show's set, working on animation sequences, aiding in editing, etc.
"From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!" -- Karl Marx
If a segment can afford to pay more, Dell and other companies will find a way to get them to pay it. You find it in airline ticket prices (last minute, weekday travel fares catch business travellers), remodelling projects cost more in rich neighborhoods, sales people judge the buyer and set the price accordingly, etc.
Is it really that different from a progressive tax system in which the rich pay more than the poor?
Slashdot Mirror
If one flips a bit in a file, is it "easy" to find a correcting bit flip(s) that returns the file to its old hash value? If so, can one create a slightly modified copy of a file by flipping the bits one wants changed and then doing a series of counterflips (in an unused part of the file) to "undo" the effects of the nefarious change?
Although terrorists might be able to build a bomb they can probably only build a, as in one, bomb. They are unlikely to be able to build and deploy many bombs. That is why one of the best defenses is to create a more distributed economic infrastructure.
I fear that NYC is a dangerous single-point-of-failure waiting to happen. Decentralizing the economic might of the country (reducing the number of company HQs in NYC and relocating financial networks to outlying areas) would reduce the magnitude of any event.
We already have most of the marketing executives in NYC, now if we could only convince the telephone sanitizers to move there.....
- both smell bad
- both create health risks for others
- both involve butts
On the flip side, tobacco has provided a bittersweet, if belated, revenge for Native Americans on those who "discovered" America ("you gave us smallpox, we gave you tobacco -- look who's dying now...")I rather have a GE90 jet engine from a 777. At over 123,000 pounds of thrust, it would definitely make for some seriously fun game play.
A friend with a cafe looked into "free WiFi" and discovered that telecom companies love to ream businesses. Yes, residential DSL was about $30/mo, but for businesses it was at least $100/month for low-end DSL (256kbps), more if you wanted decent bandwidth.
The study posts the "days of risk" defined as the time between announcement of a vulnerability and the availability of a patch. But this definition misses two big factors. First, there will be some number of days between the discovery of the vulnerability and the announcement of it. Second, there will be some number of days between the patch being available and the downloading of it. Both factors increase the days of risk and mean that a quickly-patch OS with lots of holes has higher practical risk than an slowly-patched OS with few holes.
I don't know which OS has more risks, has a greater delay between discovery and announcement, or has a greater delay between patch availability and patch application. Does MS or Linux get more slack from vulnerability finders? Do MS or Linux admins patch faster? DOes MS or Linux get more vulnerabilities? These data points would help evaluate the true risk.
It may not be "commercial", but OSS is more complete than its proprietary competition. All jokes about self-documenting code aside, I'd rather have access to the source code than to some vendor's documentation of what they think their code does. Seeing inside the box is useful when an API contains undocumented "features."
I fear that authors/editors would withdraw from Wikipedia if it were under the arm (or in the iron-fist) of a for-profit company. If these people felt like Google was profiting on the backs of their freely-contributed content, these content creators would leave and the Wiki would whither for lack of fresh/updated content. Donating time so that other may profit does not seem likely.
What is interesting is that Amazon makes this work. The company is clearly a for-profit entity. Yet its crown jewels are the volunteer-created book reviews. I'm not sure what makes this work. It might be that friends-of-authors are motivated to post glowing reviews, it might be that people who disliked the book are motivated to post scathing reviews, it might be that some reviewers simply like to publish, or all of the above. Perhaps Wiki/Google-pedia could borrow this model to mix free-labor with for-profit.
Looking further into the future on an alternate path, I wonder if Googlepedia could become a fully for-profit (or at least self-sufficient) professionally run and staffed encyclopedia. With micro-royalties to authors/editors (and moderation-based revocation of payments for "bad" content), the organization would attract content creators on a for-pay basis. This aligns the motivational underpinnings of the organization with those of the content creators. The current Wikipedia is for-free people creating for-free content. A future Googlepedia could by for-pay people creating for-pay content.
One overriding lesson from Wikipedia (and Slashdot for that matter) is the ultimate necessity of sources of hard currency for online sites. As long as something is small (and below a certain scale of popularity) it can survive on donated hardware, bandwidth, or the benevolence of a monied patron (someone who pays the hosting bills out-of-pocket). But once it reaches a certain scale, the cost of serious server power, bandwidth, and professional administrators pushes the budget far beyond the hobby scale. Although pleas for donations can help, I suspect large-scale sites must, ultimately, turn to ads, tie-in product sales, and subscriptions.
What is fascinating, in a long-term trend sense, is that the cost of scale are steadily declining. Cheaper hardware, declining bandwidth costs, and improvements in systems management tools mean that sites can reach ever-larger scales before generating prohibitive burn rates on costs. The number of visitors that a hobbyist/free-site can support continues to rise. Perhaps Wike need only wait for the singularity point when the cost to reach (and serve packets to) the entire world is within the reach of a home-grown, volunteer-run organization.
I'm sorry my post was not clear, but I was speaking of more than just the cost-to-copy. I was speaking of the total cost to provide the code. The full cost to provide a million copies of Linux (if a private company were to attempt to recreate Linux all by itself) is much greater than the cost of a million blank CDs. It includes the effective cost of all the "free" labor contributed by OSS coders (the resources required to create that first copy). If Open Source can be a business model, it must find some way to reward or motivate those who contribute their time to the original creation of the open source good.
The point is that full cost to provide something includes both the cost-to-copy (variable costs) and the cost to create that first copy or to create/maintain the infrastructure (fixed costs). If an enterprise cannot find a way to amortize its fixed costs across its activities, it will go bankrupt.
Admittedly, there are large differences between OSS and Gillette. The first set of differences are interrelated and driven by the cost of delivering a copy of the asset to the customer. Gillette faces a high cost of creating razor handles. Thus, it must create captive customers who are forced to buy blades. With OSS, the low cst of copies (the cost of download) means that OSS can tolerate a very high percentage of leaches (customers that take the free stuff and never pay for support or contribute). The ability to tolerate of leaches is a key prerequisite for Open Source.
Another similarity between OSS and Gillette is that both create (to varying degrees) an ecosystem that allows for enhancements to the core asset (e,g., add-on utilities for OSS or additional cobranded products for shaving). The fact that the core asset creates a hub for value attracts additional resources and additional customers in a virtuous circle.
Of course one key difference between OSS and Gillette is in the creation of the original core asset. Gillette pays a very large sum up-front to design the system, build the factories, and create the product (Gillette spent $1 billion to create the Mach III and 2.5 billion to create the Sensor). OSS pays "nothing" to its developers in the pre-launch phase.
The reason this works for OSS is two-fold. First, the cost of the core asset (the codebase) is almost entirely in labor. The ubiquity and low-cost of computers means that anyone can become a developer. This works because people seem psychologicaly more likely to donate time rather than money (a developer might spend 20 hours week on an OSS project at nights and on weekends, but would never consider donating 50% of a years salary to the project). Second, the very same people who donate their time to create the codebase have some hope of reward from the follow-on processes (customization and support) -- for Gillette the person the makes the handle is different from the person the make the blade.
Based on this, I would say the Open Source applies to endevours that have the following characteristics:
Low cost of copy of some core asset
Some potential for process-related revenues for use of the asset (customization, support, subcriptions, consumables, etc.)
Labor-dominated cost of asset creation
Interchangeable labor between the asset-creation and consumable/support sales process
Thanks of the link, it was very informative.
Even with CBC, I still see a vulnerability. If you inject a pattern in the file with foreknowledge that it will be encrypted with a CBC system, then you can probably influence both the encrypted pattern of bits on the output of the first block and the injected pattern of bits on the second block to create a knowable pattern of encrypted bits on the second block. Repeat as needed to propagate some detectable pattern all the way through. I suspect that stream cyphers might be susceptible to this too based on similar arguments. I suppose the encrypter could permute the blocks, pad them, or munge the data to break this, but I do wonder.
The key is that the MPAA has full access to the original file -- they are the creator of the file, after all. Also, the MPAA does not need to break the key or even reconstruct the file. They only need to determine, to some judicial court-decided level of probability, that the file is suspicious and provides probable cause of investigation. That seems like a condition not considered by traditional cypto proofs. Its like the fast Miller-Rabin algorithm that can detect prime numbers with some probability - it can't prove a massive number is prime, but it can make someone confident that it is.
Admittedly, file sharers could just create a moving target -- using one crypto method for a few weeks and then switching methods once the MPAA change the crypto-leaking fingerprint. This turns the system in to an arms race with the speed of designing, building, and installing the algorithms being the determining factor for victory.
I wonder if these fingerprints can be designed to be detectable in an encrypted file? Given that the MPAA knows the pattern of the data itself (the music) and the fingerprint, it seems possble that ghosts of that known data would be detectable in the encrypted data. I remember a cautionary tale of encrypting images with a particular implementation of DES. If the image contained large expanses of pixels of an indentical value, the outline of the image appeared in the bits of the DES-encrypted output.
Although good encrytion should make it impossible to recover unknown bits in the original file, it seems to make no gaurantees that one can't detect the presense of known data (of a sufficiently clever pattern) in the encrypted file.
IANAC, so any expert comments about why known data is made irreversibly invisible by encryption would be appreciated
As much as I, personally, do not like them or their products, I doubt that Microsoft is going away anytime soon or anytime at all. Too many people have invested too much money and time in the MSFT platform. Moreover, MSFT's biggest weakness (security) is not unique to them.
Regardless of the bad architecture decisions unique to Window's, all platforms are vulnerable. This existence of any security weakness in other platforms (even if quantitatively smaller) is used as rationale for staying with "the devil you know."
But the real core of the problem is deeper than any one exploit or architecture mistake. The core problem with security is that the "bad" guys are, in many ways, more motivated than the "good" guys. On the one hand you have the black-hat hacker/spammer/spyware creator/ crime syndicate that is sure that they can make a potload of money off any little crack in a computer's security. Thus, they are highly motivated to search for any flaw and exploit that flaw in however many millions of machines they can reach. On the other hand you have millions of users that don't think that they will have a security problem and thousands of programmers who think their code (or at least their job) is secure. Thus neither the programmers nor the users are as motivated to create security and the bad guys are motivated to defeat security. Thus, the global resources devoted to cracking computers exceeds the local resources to securing computers. Thus all computers have holes and MSFT is unlikely to die because Windows is somehow uniquely insecure.
At worst/best I see Windows slipping to 50%? marketshare before MSFT throws more programmer-hours at security than the entire OSS community could ever hope to muster. With enough of the proverbial monkeys at keyboards, MSFT will regain the security crown or at least through enough marketing dollars to claim it. Morevoer, as Windows loses marketshare, the black hats will attack other platforms. People will soon realize that the new non-Microsoft software is really not that much better than the old stuff and go back to MSFT. At best (for Microsoft's foes), the world will reach some equilibrium point of Windows, Linux, Macintosh, and other platforms.
At $15-100 per click-through, /. might do quite a bit of damage to some lawyer's wallet. I assume the ads have limits on total numbers, but I'd bet that most of the click-happy people that follow these links won't be actual clients for asbestos litigation.
We get average of at least one Washington Mutual phishing email per day and have absolutely no affiliation with the company. Its definitely the most popular phishing target (more popular than paypal or ebay in our little back water of the IP space). I don't know if WaMu is especially phish-easy, but they seem to be a strong target.
I was at a knowledge management conference where someone talked about how knowledge workers spend their time. A study of Microsoft software developers uncovered that they spent 75% of their day using Outlook. I kid you not!
Although timely communications and collaboration are essential to massive distributed development projects, I wonder about the human capacity to prioritize and handle the barrage of incoming communications created by e-mail, IM, etc. I wonder if companies could create scoped-communication tools that intentionally filter and limit connectivity to some "optimal" level.
So now, someone is *PAYING* the sales person in that store to show customers products by Dior everytime they ask to see your products. If you were Louis Vuitton you would not be happy about that.
This is no different than the practice of spiffs or push money to motivate the sales force to sell a particular product. I agree that it is not pleasant for the maker (and may be unethical toward the consumer), but paying the retailer for favored position, promotion, etc. is widespread.
If I search for 'Louis Vuitton' then I only want to see search results for Louis Vuitton.
Then you and I are different in our search habits. I sometimes use a brand name that I know as a convenient term to find hits in a category (especially to find reviews of products in the category or retailers in the category). Category terms are sometimes harder to create and more ambiguous then brand names. Perhaps Google needs a search modifier or preference to distinguish between "strict" (your style) and "loose" (my style) of searches.
If I go to a store and ask for "Louis Vuitton" is it trademark infringement if the sales person also shows me Dior or some other maker's products? I would argue that as long as Google's ads do not mislead the user into thinking that the link is for "Louis Vuitton" then it is no different than a store clerk showing me a competing good.
All Google is doing is recognizing that people use specific terms to represent generic actions. I may search for "Louis Vuitton" but really intend to look at luxury goods of a wide range of makers -- the trademark name is only being used to find hits in the category. As long as the ads don't pretend to offer something they don't (bait and switch), I would argue that Google is serving the purpose of search.
For the price of one shuttle launch, NASA could offer a very hefty, very inviting prize to private companies that can deliver a suitable payload to orbit and the ISS. NASA might offer some more modest sub-prizes for lesser accomplishments (e.g., delivering a small crew with no payload to ISS).
Although cutting costs is a fine idea, your IT department may be able to help the rest of the company deliver more top-line and bottom-line growth. You might want to think about how IT can help the sales-force be more productive, help ensure that customers get what they want, help employees keep working, help managers see the big picture, etc.
I'd think about (and document) how you can add value, not just cut costs.
How can customers trust Microsoft's code if they have no ability to see the source code?
Call me a curmudgeon, but it seems like most of the heat is created by wasted cpu cycles. Eye candy is nice, but at 200 million computers in the U.S. alone, each Watt saved represents about $31 million in annual energy costs (assuming 40 hrs/wk, @ $0.074/kWHr. Reducing power consumption by 10 W would pay for a lot of good beer to fuel software development for more efficient software.
Fans may not be able to muster the xx million for a physical production of the show, but what about a lower-cost CGI version? Fans could contribute CPU cycles for rendering the show. And some fans could even help in creating episodes by creating 3-D models of the show's set, working on animation sequences, aiding in editing, etc.
Thanks for all the great pictures.
"From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!" -- Karl Marx
If a segment can afford to pay more, Dell and other companies will find a way to get them to pay it. You find it in airline ticket prices (last minute, weekday travel fares catch business travellers), remodelling projects cost more in rich neighborhoods, sales people judge the buyer and set the price accordingly, etc.
Is it really that different from a progressive tax system in which the rich pay more than the poor?