Risk Impact: High
Systems Potentially Affected: All PCs
Behavior:
Windows.vista is malware that gobbles up all resources on a machine and renders it unusable. Suggested solution is to visit the following malware cleansing site : http://fedora.redhat.com/
..this is not IT-specific. Ignorance and uncertainty about anything naturally lead to fear. The paranoia of a CIO is proportional to his/her ignorance, all other things being equal. Every company is different and the variables involved differ. Information security is a matter of risk mitigation and an understanding of the value of the data that needs to be protected. If you work for an internet company that deals with a lot of scraped data from the web, IT need not be nearly as keen to protect data as, say, the DoD.
I've worked in corporate R&D labs with relatively high security that still provided wireless access on the grounds of the lab. This is a security risk, perhaps, but one that was mitigated to an extent deemed acceptable, given the value it provided. Another company I worked for, with far less to worry about from a data protection perspective, denied our numerous requests for wireless access on grounds of "security". In other words, they were too incompetent to mitigate the risk involved to provide a valuable service to us.
I especially like his point on the economic inefficiencies that result from Google's vulnerability to results manipulation or 'tweaking'. In a certain unnamed, small internet company I worked for, fully 10% of our staff were SEM/SEO people, and a good chunk of our development time was spent on projects led by them trying to optimize our page rankings. I'm sure we're not the only ones.
If a theoretical "merit-based" search engine existed, those non-trivial resources would be spent building a better mousetrap, making our site faster, etc. I hope such an engine exists some day...
Considering that it is common to hear a certain popular news broadcaster telling a guest to "shut up", Wikia can't be much worse. I don't think there's a whole lot of civilised discussion going on in the (mainstream) media these days on either side of the political divide. Don't blame the medium, blame the people.
The point is not whether the site is doing something "wrong" or "illegal" by having these passwords up there. You can very easily argue that these users/passwords have no good reason to be up on that site.
Call me an alarmist, but the problem is that the way this was conducted was more reminiscent of 1990's Russia than 2007 America. Corporation X has a pest and asks Corporation Y to swat it, probably under (implied) threat of some retaliatory action. Today it's "users and passwords" and tomorrow it could be "some pesky service they provide that interferes with our profits". This basic respect of the law and process that we apparently have in the West is an absolutely critical component of our prosperity. If small fish begin to fear that they can be arbitrarily swatted by large players, our entrepreneurial spirit will be choked.
I'll bet you think this nasty "freedom of speech" ideal is a national security threat as well. All these damn people wanting to say whatever they want. They're out of line!
I don't think there is a significant difference and there's nothing wrong with that. My father is a grease monkey. I'm an electronic grease monkey. Many skilled tradesmen working "dirty" construction and blue-collar jobs make a lot of money because their skills require extensive experience and time to acquire, and make a lot more money than many non-IT white-collar workers. We IT people do the electronic dirty work that others cannot do and are paid accordingly.
It's the stigma and aristocratic snobbery that many business types have that prevent them from taking CIO/CTOs seriously as business leaders, and that is what i'm referring to when I say it's their loss.
I think you're on the right track. Business types look at IT and IT workers as "infrastructure". In other words, we're no different from construction workers in their eyes. Even if you get up to CIO/CTO, you're still an electronic grease monkey.
Of course it's their loss. Those companies that are a bit more insightful and can see what a CIO/CTO can bring to the table, will be better off for it.
MyISAM will probably still have its uses in read-intensive applications where simplicity is most important even after Falcon is released officially, as will InnoDB and MySQL cluster have their uses. This is the benefit of MySQL's pluggable architecture -- you can choose the right tool for the job.
I've been very excited since I first heard about this new storage engine adapted from Netfrastructure. Not only does it give MySQL a transactional storage engine that is not controlled by a hostile company, but the engine appears to be designed from the bottom up to support web traffic. Jim gave a great talk at the Boston MySQL meetup that you can watch here http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1929002440 950908895
... but then they came to my office. The sheer concentration of flu-stricken people who don't seem to understand the concept of "sick day" (or can't afford to) and ventilation systems that seem to be designed to spread the virus around would have anyone sick in a matter of days.
Height is a perfect example of recent human evolution at work. I stumbled upon this interesting article once, describing the reasons for certain regions of the world producing a disproportionate number of NBA players:
From the above article:
"Europeans tend to grow tallest where the climate is cold but not frigid. Writing in 1965 before the Dutch grew quite so tall, the prominent physical anthropologist Carlton Coon noted, "In mean stature, we find the tallest people in Scotland, Iceland, Scandinavia, the eastern Baltic region, and the Balkans, particularly Montenegro and Albania. In general, the crest of tallest stature runs on the cold side of the winter frost line... Coon pointed out that this pattern follows Bergmann's Law, a rule of thumb in biology that states that within a species, animal populations living in the colder parts of the range tend to be larger and heavier than those living in the warmer parts."
While diet and the wealth of a country are certainly correlated with average height, the Balkans in particular is the poorest region of europe, while producing some of its tallest people. Moreover, the current slavic inhabitants of the Balkans have lived there for at most 1500-2000 years, while their slavic cousins that migrated to other parts of eastern europe have not grown so tall. This points to a recent evolutionary adaptation to the environment.
This report is a step forward for people who have been talking about peak oil for years now. It moves the debate more into the mainsteam and out from the realms of conspiracy and doomsday theory. More people will begin to question blind consumption of fossil fuels and search for sustainable alternatives. Others still will look at reports like this and dig deeper into the facts to find the truth.
Although I am no fan of Oracle, I must admit that this is a good idea, and one that is suprisingly overdue. Databases like Oracle and DB2 require a great depth of skills and experience to administer, and they are among the applications that stress operating system limits to the max, so integration between OS and DB is cruicial. A DBA or a DBA team has to bridge the wide gulf between sysadmin and business analyst. If you lessen the tedious task of tweaking and tuning a database to perform optimally on a given OS and hardware, you allow the DBA to focus on more important things, like deciding how to manage the data.
While these appliances would never replace a skilled DBA for a performance-critical system, there are many small/medium-sized businesses with modest DB requirements that would benefit greatly from such a device, and put many a useless, lazy DBA out of work.
I think it's more specific than a culture of "flaunting the law". That attitude can be found in people in countries all over the world, whether it's speeding motorists in Los Angeles or hackers in East Europe. It may be more pronounced in Eastern Europe, but i don't think that's the issue.
The Russia and the ex-Soviet states had an entire 'industry' dedicated to reverse-engineering and stealing Western intellectual property. In a sense, not a lot has changed since the cold-war: rather than stealing Western technologies like chip designs, they are now using their technical prowess to steal more directly from the West.
The converse is true to some extent -- certainly many Western engineers and scientists worked extensively on understanding and reverse-engineering certain Soviet advances during the cold war (especially in the military sphere). The difference is that these Westerners were able to be redeployed productively into the economy in the post-Cold war era whereas these same ex-Soviet scientists/engineers and their successors have far fewer options, and fall prey to criminal syndicates who can provide them a Western living standard due to their large "revenues".
I think it's time to recognise the opportunity to automate this yearly rehash of the discussion around the ACM contest results. I don't even need to read all the posts, we've all seen it before!
It's time to possibly consider new advances in natural language systems and auto-generate the slashdot discussion for coming years. Here are the key elements:
a. jokes made at the expense of the American teams (which is not necessarily even fair IMO; the problems are damn hard, and solving 4 while the Russians or Chinese solve 5, for example, does not imply a pending catastrophe in the American higher education system)
b. inevitable comparisons made between the budgets of the American vs. non-American universities
c. indignant responses from insecure B, C-class American developers who just don't get that computer science is rooted in mathematics, and complaining that the contest is not "realistic", probably since they've never seen the inside of a University
d. Waterloo students, sometimes being the only university in North America in the top 10, thumbing their noses at the American schools, and espousing the superiority of their school (disclaimer: I went to Waterloo)
e. Gloating from the {Russian, Chinese, other non-American} winners
f. Accusations from those same B, C class developers/students that students from {insert_winning_univ_here} are "specifically trained" to take the contest (yes, in fact they are: it's called being educated, and that's what is supposed to happen in a university, not frat parties)
There may be other general categories, or maybe i've missed a couple, but i think this fits most of the posts pretty nicely.
Here is my idea: take all discussions from previous ACM contests where the results are essentially the same, and use some automated or perhaps manual procedure to flag the post as one of the above categories. For example, the parent probably belongs in class "c" although that's not a perfect fit. Develop a relatively simple transition diagram or whatever to designate which type of post should follow another. Some examples, using the designations from above:
post "e" --> "f" or less likely "c" (say (0.8, 0.2) probability)
post "a" --> "c" or less likely "f" (again say (0.8, 0.2)
post "f" --> "b" or sometimes "d"
And so on...
Put together a relatively simple database of posts, do some random selection and assignment with the above and i'll bet you can generate a somewhat coherent discussion.
Perhaps this should be a problem in the 2007 ACM:)
Moreover, this is a fork of yet another cms: FOYACMS. I like the ring of that.. FOYACMS. Maybe this should be the new name!
Having said that, I think people interested in a CMS for personal or small business use should look into Joomla. It is very easy to administer and install, provides a lot of flexibility in layout and content and has a lot of community support.
[MySQL Chief Executive Marten Mickos] did, however, say why he turned down Oracle's offer: the desire to keep his company's independence. "We will be part of a larger company, but it will be called MySQL,"
Given that Oracle has already acquired the makers of two of MySQL's transactional engines, putting them in a real tough spot, I'm sure Mr. Ellison assumed this final offer to MySQL to be just a formality.
This kind of integrity is so rare these days. Whatever happens, we should all try our best to support MySQL in what may be a losing battle against an evil foe.
This is old news. Data mining systems like this have been around for years. Some are even actual real data mining systems (i.e. a SELECT statement against two tables is not data mining!! argh... i digress)
I once gave my two weeks notice to a company and was still kept around to do my job as before, despite being in a position to do considerable harm to the company if i so wished. As has been pointed out, if I had any malicious intentions, i'd have carried them out long before giving notice.
During that two weeks, another employee under a different manager was escorted out after giving his two weeks notice. The difference in the effect on employee morale between the two departures could not be more pronounced. I had been treated honourably and made my best effort to tie up loose ends, making life easier for my co-workers and easing my conscience. The second departure just reinforced the "us versus them" thinking many employees had regarding management.
The risk management types look at such a situation as a trade of two weeks productivity of one person to mitigate what is really a negligible risk of malicious activity. Perhaps this was sound thinking in a factory environment 50 years ago. Let's see them quantify the cost of having an entire team of employees convinced that management has no respect for them.
Why... why must we give others reason to perpetuate the balkan stereotype?
I am of "balkan" background and I saw this post, discussing an interesting initiative that we should all be praising. It's great to see positive news coming from that part of the world, even if this is just a drop in the bucket. It's the vision that's important. Why can't we just keep the discussion to that? I thought, almost 15 years after the breakup of Yugoslavia, that perhaps, just maybe, I might read through this entire thread without seeing a regression into political bickering, mention of Tito, or the Turks, war or ethnic cleansing, etc. etc. But, alas, I was wrong.
Does an article about some Linux initiative in Germany need to involve at some point a discussion of WW2? Why can't we just leave the past in the past and look forwards?
Save up some of that anger. The government will be counting on it when they announce their latest expedition to a foreign land to pillage it of its resources so that we can maintain our lofty standard of living.
I don't approve of killing anywhere. But I also don't think it makes sense for us, in the west, to be outraged when our innocent civilians are killed, while innocent civilians are killed in our names on a daily basis, on a larger scale, in foreign lands. Are we so arrogant that we think our lives more valuable than theirs? Is an innocent Iraqi death less meaningful than a Briton?
This is why a free and independant media is so vital to a healthy society -- if we regularly saw just how many people die around the world as a result of our government's actions, perhaps we would vote differently, and perhaps the terrible tragedy today could have been avoided.
FUD tactics pointing to Australia are almost as dishonest. With respect to skin cancer and use of sunscreen, Australia is an abnormal case in two important ways:
- the depletion of the ozone layer over Australia has resulted in UV rays that are stronger than anything we've been exposed to over thousands of years of evolution. Hypothetically, if the ozone layer had retreated in such a way all across the globe 10,000 years ago, we would all probably look much much different (hairier and/or darker)
- Australia is inhabited in large part by very fair skinned people of British Isles decent, most of which are adapted to a far cooler climate
So, if you are of (part) Mediterranean descent like me, and living in Toronto, Canada, latitude 42, the risk of other cancers as a result of chronic Vitamin D deficiency is probably higher than skin cancer
If you are a fair skinned person in Australia, the reverse is probably true.
So I think it comes down to common sense, as with most things.
Likening Canadians to third-world guest workers shipping every last dollar back overseas (newsflash: Canada and US are connected by land) is absurd. A foreigner working in your country does not imply that that person is a desperate third-world refugee. There are a number of Japanese and Germans that I work with in my company, as there are certainly many Americans who work abroad. This is a normal exchange of ideas and perspectives between civilised countries.
If someone can work an illegal white-collar job in your country, blame your broken laws, law enforcement and the corrupt employer. Whether this person is an American who doesn't feel like paying tax on his income or a Canadian "guest worker" is irrelevant; this is a grey economy issue not an illegal immigration issue.
You may want to inform yourself a bit more, from a source other than Foxnews, about the relationship between Canada and the US before making such posts. Canadian-American co-operation in various spheres has been the norm since well before the whole globalisation trend. For example, the quintessential American computer company, IBM, in fact first came to be known as "IBM" in Canada (back in 1917). Northern border states like Michigan, New York, Washington probably have much more in common socially, economically and politically with their Canadian counterparts over the border than with, say, South Carolina or Texas.
Slashdot Mirror
Risk Impact: High
Systems Potentially Affected: All PCs
Behavior:
Windows.vista is malware that gobbles up all resources on a machine and renders it unusable. Suggested solution is to visit the following malware cleansing site : http://fedora.redhat.com/
I've worked in corporate R&D labs with relatively high security that still provided wireless access on the grounds of the lab. This is a security risk, perhaps, but one that was mitigated to an extent deemed acceptable, given the value it provided. Another company I worked for, with far less to worry about from a data protection perspective, denied our numerous requests for wireless access on grounds of "security". In other words, they were too incompetent to mitigate the risk involved to provide a valuable service to us.
If a theoretical "merit-based" search engine existed, those non-trivial resources would be spent building a better mousetrap, making our site faster, etc. I hope such an engine exists some day...
- WWE announcer
- NHL Referee
- Circus Ringleader
Alas, none of these do justice to the likes of O'Reilly and his peers.
Considering that it is common to hear a certain popular news broadcaster telling a guest to "shut up", Wikia can't be much worse. I don't think there's a whole lot of civilised discussion going on in the (mainstream) media these days on either side of the political divide. Don't blame the medium, blame the people.
Call me an alarmist, but the problem is that the way this was conducted was more reminiscent of 1990's Russia than 2007 America. Corporation X has a pest and asks Corporation Y to swat it, probably under (implied) threat of some retaliatory action. Today it's "users and passwords" and tomorrow it could be "some pesky service they provide that interferes with our profits". This basic respect of the law and process that we apparently have in the West is an absolutely critical component of our prosperity. If small fish begin to fear that they can be arbitrarily swatted by large players, our entrepreneurial spirit will be choked.
I'll bet you think this nasty "freedom of speech" ideal is a national security threat as well. All these damn people wanting to say whatever they want. They're out of line!
It's the stigma and aristocratic snobbery that many business types have that prevent them from taking CIO/CTOs seriously as business leaders, and that is what i'm referring to when I say it's their loss.
Of course it's their loss. Those companies that are a bit more insightful and can see what a CIO/CTO can bring to the table, will be better off for it.
MyISAM will probably still have its uses in read-intensive applications where simplicity is most important even after Falcon is released officially, as will InnoDB and MySQL cluster have their uses. This is the benefit of MySQL's pluggable architecture -- you can choose the right tool for the job.
I've been very excited since I first heard about this new storage engine adapted from Netfrastructure. Not only does it give MySQL a transactional storage engine that is not controlled by a hostile company, but the engine appears to be designed from the bottom up to support web traffic. Jim gave a great talk at the Boston MySQL meetup that you can watch here http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1929002440 950908895
... but then they came to my office. The sheer concentration of flu-stricken people who don't seem to understand the concept of "sick day" (or can't afford to) and ventilation systems that seem to be designed to spread the virus around would have anyone sick in a matter of days.
http://www.isteve.com/2003_NBA_Height_Spreading_Gl obally.htm
From the above article: "Europeans tend to grow tallest where the climate is cold but not frigid. Writing in 1965 before the Dutch grew quite so tall, the prominent physical anthropologist Carlton Coon noted, "In mean stature, we find the tallest people in Scotland, Iceland, Scandinavia, the eastern Baltic region, and the Balkans, particularly Montenegro and Albania. In general, the crest of tallest stature runs on the cold side of the winter frost line... Coon pointed out that this pattern follows Bergmann's Law, a rule of thumb in biology that states that within a species, animal populations living in the colder parts of the range tend to be larger and heavier than those living in the warmer parts."
While diet and the wealth of a country are certainly correlated with average height, the Balkans in particular is the poorest region of europe, while producing some of its tallest people. Moreover, the current slavic inhabitants of the Balkans have lived there for at most 1500-2000 years, while their slavic cousins that migrated to other parts of eastern europe have not grown so tall. This points to a recent evolutionary adaptation to the environment.
This report is a step forward for people who have been talking about peak oil for years now. It moves the debate more into the mainsteam and out from the realms of conspiracy and doomsday theory. More people will begin to question blind consumption of fossil fuels and search for sustainable alternatives. Others still will look at reports like this and dig deeper into the facts to find the truth.
While these appliances would never replace a skilled DBA for a performance-critical system, there are many small/medium-sized businesses with modest DB requirements that would benefit greatly from such a device, and put many a useless, lazy DBA out of work.
I think it's more specific than a culture of "flaunting the law". That attitude can be found in people in countries all over the world, whether it's speeding motorists in Los Angeles or hackers in East Europe. It may be more pronounced in Eastern Europe, but i don't think that's the issue.
The Russia and the ex-Soviet states had an entire 'industry' dedicated to reverse-engineering and stealing Western intellectual property. In a sense, not a lot has changed since the cold-war: rather than stealing Western technologies like chip designs, they are now using their technical prowess to steal more directly from the West.
The converse is true to some extent -- certainly many Western engineers and scientists worked extensively on understanding and reverse-engineering certain Soviet advances during the cold war (especially in the military sphere). The difference is that these Westerners were able to be redeployed productively into the economy in the post-Cold war era whereas these same ex-Soviet scientists/engineers and their successors have far fewer options, and fall prey to criminal syndicates who can provide them a Western living standard due to their large "revenues".
I think it's time to recognise the opportunity to automate this yearly rehash of the discussion around the ACM contest results. I don't even need to read all the posts, we've all seen it before!
:)
It's time to possibly consider new advances in natural language systems and auto-generate the slashdot discussion for coming years. Here are the key elements:
a. jokes made at the expense of the American teams (which is not necessarily even fair IMO; the problems are damn hard, and solving 4 while the Russians or Chinese solve 5, for example, does not imply a pending catastrophe in the American higher education system)
b. inevitable comparisons made between the budgets of the American vs. non-American universities
c. indignant responses from insecure B, C-class American developers who just don't get that computer science is rooted in mathematics, and complaining that the contest is not "realistic", probably since they've never seen the inside of a University
d. Waterloo students, sometimes being the only university in North America in the top 10, thumbing their noses at the American schools, and espousing the superiority of their school (disclaimer: I went to Waterloo)
e. Gloating from the {Russian, Chinese, other non-American} winners
f. Accusations from those same B, C class developers/students that students from {insert_winning_univ_here} are "specifically trained" to take the contest (yes, in fact they are: it's called being educated, and that's what is supposed to happen in a university, not frat parties)
There may be other general categories, or maybe i've missed a couple, but i think this fits most of the posts pretty nicely.
Here is my idea: take all discussions from previous ACM contests where the results are essentially the same, and use some automated or perhaps manual procedure to flag the post as one of the above categories. For example, the parent probably belongs in class "c" although that's not a perfect fit. Develop a relatively simple transition diagram or whatever to designate which type of post should follow another. Some examples, using the designations from above:
post "e" --> "f" or less likely "c" (say (0.8, 0.2) probability)
post "a" --> "c" or less likely "f" (again say (0.8, 0.2)
post "f" --> "b" or sometimes "d"
And so on...
Put together a relatively simple database of posts, do some random selection and assignment with the above and i'll bet you can generate a somewhat coherent discussion.
Perhaps this should be a problem in the 2007 ACM
Moreover, this is a fork of yet another cms: FOYACMS. I like the ring of that.. FOYACMS. Maybe this should be the new name!
Having said that, I think people interested in a CMS for personal or small business use should look into Joomla. It is very easy to administer and install, provides a lot of flexibility in layout and content and has a lot of community support.
Given that Oracle has already acquired the makers of two of MySQL's transactional engines, putting them in a real tough spot, I'm sure Mr. Ellison assumed this final offer to MySQL to be just a formality.
This kind of integrity is so rare these days. Whatever happens, we should all try our best to support MySQL in what may be a losing battle against an evil foe.
This is old news. Data mining systems like this have been around for years. Some are even actual real data mining systems (i.e. a SELECT statement against two tables is not data mining!! argh... i digress)
I once gave my two weeks notice to a company and was still kept around to do my job as before, despite being in a position to do considerable harm to the company if i so wished. As has been pointed out, if I had any malicious intentions, i'd have carried them out long before giving notice.
During that two weeks, another employee under a different manager was escorted out after giving his two weeks notice. The difference in the effect on employee morale between the two departures could not be more pronounced. I had been treated honourably and made my best effort to tie up loose ends, making life easier for my co-workers and easing my conscience. The second departure just reinforced the "us versus them" thinking many employees had regarding management.
The risk management types look at such a situation as a trade of two weeks productivity of one person to mitigate what is really a negligible risk of malicious activity. Perhaps this was sound thinking in a factory environment 50 years ago. Let's see them quantify the cost of having an entire team of employees convinced that management has no respect for them.
I am of "balkan" background and I saw this post, discussing an interesting initiative that we should all be praising. It's great to see positive news coming from that part of the world, even if this is just a drop in the bucket. It's the vision that's important. Why can't we just keep the discussion to that? I thought, almost 15 years after the breakup of Yugoslavia, that perhaps, just maybe, I might read through this entire thread without seeing a regression into political bickering, mention of Tito, or the Turks, war or ethnic cleansing, etc. etc. But, alas, I was wrong.
Does an article about some Linux initiative in Germany need to involve at some point a discussion of WW2? Why can't we just leave the past in the past and look forwards?
I don't approve of killing anywhere. But I also don't think it makes sense for us, in the west, to be outraged when our innocent civilians are killed, while innocent civilians are killed in our names on a daily basis, on a larger scale, in foreign lands. Are we so arrogant that we think our lives more valuable than theirs? Is an innocent Iraqi death less meaningful than a Briton?
This is why a free and independant media is so vital to a healthy society -- if we regularly saw just how many people die around the world as a result of our government's actions, perhaps we would vote differently, and perhaps the terrible tragedy today could have been avoided.
FUD tactics pointing to Australia are almost as dishonest. With respect to skin cancer and use of sunscreen, Australia is an abnormal case in two important ways:
- the depletion of the ozone layer over Australia has resulted in UV rays that are stronger than anything we've been exposed to over thousands of years of evolution. Hypothetically, if the ozone layer had retreated in such a way all across the globe 10,000 years ago, we would all probably look much much different (hairier and/or darker)
- Australia is inhabited in large part by very fair skinned people of British Isles decent, most of which are adapted to a far cooler climate
So, if you are of (part) Mediterranean descent like me, and living in Toronto, Canada, latitude 42, the risk of other cancers as a result of chronic Vitamin D deficiency is probably higher than skin cancer
If you are a fair skinned person in Australia, the reverse is probably true.
So I think it comes down to common sense, as with most things.
Likening Canadians to third-world guest workers shipping every last dollar back overseas (newsflash: Canada and US are connected by land) is absurd. A foreigner working in your country does not imply that that person is a desperate third-world refugee. There are a number of Japanese and Germans that I work with in my company, as there are certainly many Americans who work abroad. This is a normal exchange of ideas and perspectives between civilised countries. If someone can work an illegal white-collar job in your country, blame your broken laws, law enforcement and the corrupt employer. Whether this person is an American who doesn't feel like paying tax on his income or a Canadian "guest worker" is irrelevant; this is a grey economy issue not an illegal immigration issue. You may want to inform yourself a bit more, from a source other than Foxnews, about the relationship between Canada and the US before making such posts. Canadian-American co-operation in various spheres has been the norm since well before the whole globalisation trend. For example, the quintessential American computer company, IBM, in fact first came to be known as "IBM" in Canada (back in 1917). Northern border states like Michigan, New York, Washington probably have much more in common socially, economically and politically with their Canadian counterparts over the border than with, say, South Carolina or Texas.