Apple has traditionally had two target markets. Those markets are education and "creative professionals". Creative professionals aren't going to turn out enterprise applications, but they can sure come up with some spiffy product literature. The education culture is focused on learning, not application development. In the past decade Apple has expanded their focus to include the consumer market.
Apple is so far behind the curve in the business market that they'd run themselves out of money trying to play catchup. They can't compete in the desktop space. I've heard that their X-Serve boxes are nice, but even in the SMB market they'd get clobbered by HP and Dell. They don't have anything close to what IBM and Oracle/Sun are putting out for enterprise customers. Beyond that, there aren't enough developers targeting the platform to develop the accounting packages, ERP systems, groupware servers, etc. that businesses run on.
Counter points... If someone else picked up your house and moved it to another lot, you'd want it back. If someone moved into your house and changed the locks on you, you'd want some sort of recourse. You probably don't own your house, the bank does. Even if you've paid off the mortgage, you still have to pay property taxes and maintenance (new roof, old plumbing, carpet, etc) If someone drove away with your car you would want it back.
When you buy a house or a car, are you buying it for yourself or are you buying it for the entire neighborhood? The problem with software is that one copy can be reproduced an infinite number of times. A company has a couple of choices. They can lock their software into their hardware like Apple does. Or they can try to find the economic sweet spot between affordability for the customer and profitability for the company. I spent my teens on BBSes downloading all the warez I could. Despite that when I found a game from a publisher that I liked, I would pay for it. I wanted the company to say in business so that they could make more games. I feel the same way about Windows. For all of its warts, the applications that make day to day life easier (and make it possible for the organization I work for to function efficiently) are Windows apps.
Your car analogy fails because you have to continually pay to keep it registered, even after you buy it. When you pay for your registration and insurance, you don't get "free" upgrades. The car just keeps getting older. On the positive side, the car pretty much just works right off of the lot. Software is a process of gradual improvement.
Having said all of that, I think that Microsoft is fighting a losing battle. The OS itself is quickly becoming obsolete. Applications are moving away from the desktop and onto the web on the front end. On the back end, developers are finding alternative platforms to develop for. Sooner or later we are going to reach the point where a "good enough" solution is provided outside of the Windows ecosystem.
Windows continues to thrive because of the applications available exclusively on the platform. Even so, those applications are being virtualized on both the desktop (think Parallels, VirtualBox, et al) and on the server (Citrix, Terminal Services, etc.) Again, the OS becomes less relevant. If I were an app developer, I'd be scared to death of developing something for Microsoft SQL Server because of the fear that someone else would develop a similar product targeting MySQL or Progres running on Linux. It would be impossible to compete on cost and it would be unfair to my clients to expect them to eat Windows licensing fees on top of whatever I wanted to charge them for my app.
I like Windows because for me it just works. I realize I'm probably in the minority, and that's why I get paid to come to work five days a week and make sure that it "just works" for close to 200 other people. As a consultant I was responsible for thousands of Windows boxes and servers for organizations that reached across the globe. I've setup Linux servers and after hours of tweaking and configuring, they continue to just work. I've worked with OSX, and it just works... until you use some none Apple software (Adobe, I'm looking at you). Like everyone else on here, I've grown up with technology. It's my experience that in this day and age, the only thing that comes close to just working is my game console (PS3). It even phones home for new firmware from time to time.
The likely scenario is more along the lines of: US military raids al Qaeda safe house in Pakistan and recovers laptops. Laptops are protected by TPM chips. Owner of authentication mechanism (making the assumption it isn't a thumb print) refuses to divulge the information. Laptop is sent back to CIA station and the chip is physically cracked.
As others have mentioned, the chip is just one layer of defense. Odds are that the hard drive itself will be encrypted and that's a whole other nut to crack.
Here's the unanswered question in my mind. The original hack required serious physical manipulation of the chip. What about the chip design precludes developing a TPM compatible chip that disables the protections?
The only hardware hacking that I've ever been privy to involved the Oki 900 cellphone in the mid-90s. Obvious the Oki EPROM and the TPM chip are different beasts. Having said that, when hacking the Oki the EPROM was replaced with one that enhanced code in addition to the base code from the factory.
Given that the internals of the TPM chip have been pried open and can be observed in real time, how long until replacement chips are available that disable the protections, but make it appear that those protections are in place?
This seems like something that the NSA is probably salivating over. Imagine being able to translate intercepts in near real time with accurate voice recognition. I'm sure they already have imagined it. That technology is nothing short of a Manhattan Project for the SIGINT community.
In my mind it is the scope of reward that is evil and wrong. In the article, it is mentioned that one of the Sun executives is getting a severance package worth $175 MILLION dollars. That compensation package is enough to pay 1750 employees $100,000 for a year. Those 1750 imaginary employees who would be making that $100,000 are employees who are doing the jobs given to them by senior management. For all intents and purposes, those people are probably doing their jobs competently. Despite the fact that they are competent at their job, they are getting laid off.
People who are competent get laid off. The person responsibility for the health of the company gets enough money that he could pay 1749 other people a significant amount of money, even though he completely failed to keep the company going.
As the blog post mentions, the problem is fiduciary responsibility and the fact that in many cases (including Sun), the major share holders are also the executives themselves. So the CEO, CFO, Chairman of the Board and the rest of the executives set things up so that even in failing, they increased their stock value 42%. Thousands of employees lose their jobs, but those guys at the top get hundreds of millions of dollars among them.
There is a saying that "There is no greater sin than not knowing when you have enough." Corporate America is out of wack. The guys at the top fail so seriously that their companies go bankrupt. Despite that, they get millions of dollars. Employees who do their jobs don't get millions of dollars, and when the company fails they get assed out.
The "evil" that you don't understand is the rewarding of failure that leads to the suffering of others.
To make it easier to understand and to make a more basic explanation, lets replace "money" with "food". Lets say that the executive in charge of Sun has a machine that makes food for thousands of people. He runs the machine so poorly that it breaks down, and thousands of people no longer have access to the food it provides. In the process of breaking the machine, he manages to engineer it so that the very last time he runs the machine, it makes enough food to feed him, his family and his friends' families for a couple hundred years if they manage the food he created properly.
If there weren't laws in place to protect the asshole running the machine, the masses would tear him apart and divvy up the food he set aside for himself. Since there are laws in place, the asshole gets labeled "evil and wrong".
If there were justice in the world, or if the person running the machine were moral, he'd divvy up the remains equally among the tribe who helped him run the machine. There isn't justice in the world, and the man running the machine isn't moral. He took the lions share of what the machine produced and left everyone else out in the cold.
Two things your logic misses. First you've completely ignored the fact that the profits from drugs are used to finance the war. It isn't just the Taliban who are trading dope for military hardware. The drug trade is a perfect way for the government and companies to launder money. Here is a link to a PBS article that details a small, ACKNOWLEDGED portion of the process.
The PBS article talks about legit goods like appliances and automobiles. The arms market is a whole other beast. The CIA and other agencies use drugs to fund operations that they can't go to Congress for.
Here's an article about how the CIA was involved in running drugs through Arkansas.
The other thing that I think you should consider is that the farmers need an alternate crop. As others have stated, there isn't much that will grown in Afghanistan. They could grow hemp though. In my mind, and I've said it before, it would be great to switch them from opium to hemp. Opium has one use. It is a pain killer. Hemp has multiple uses. The way I conceived of it working, the UN or US or whoever would buy the opium for a few years while the transition takes place. Once the farmers start growing hemp, they could sell to local markets in the provincial capitols. The capitols could start to build infrastructure to use the hemp. Hemp can be turned into cloth for clothing. The oil can be used for cooking and heating. The farmers could be allowed to grow marijuana too. It's about time that people pull their heads of their asses regarding marijuana prohibition. It isn't the best substance in world for your body, but it isn't any worse than cigarettes or alcohol. The added benefit of hemp is that it encourages companion industries like textiles.
In short, Maxtor drives that were produced in Taiwan contained trojan source code that phone home to two servers located in China. There wasn't any conclusive evidence to tie the incident directly to the Chinese (wink wink, nudge nudge).
If I have a paper book and I think a friend of mine will enjoy it, I can hand the book off to them when they are done. If they have a friend who will enjoy it, they can pass it along, etc. With a paper book, once I'm done with it I can take it to a used book store and they will give me a small amount toward the purchase of another book.
eBooks completely destroy the second hand book market. A paper book has some intrinsic value to others beyond the original purchaser. In my mind, that alone makes it worth ~$15+ (hard cover).
Anyone who is willing to pay a similar amount for an eBook as they would pay for a physical book isn't very smart.
It looks like eBooks are looking to make a big push into the classroom. Textbooks are already ridiculously expensive. Does anything think that electronic textbooks are going to be any less expensive? What will happen to the large number of students who are currently buying used text books? That entire market disappears.
I wonder what the NSA's hourly rate is. Surely Google is going to be paying them, right? If the spooks are being paid by tax dollars and working for the public sector there is something shady going on there. I'm all for the NSA and Google working together to make Google a more profitable comapany... Wait, no I'm not! Given Google's current stock valuation, they can go right ahead and kick down some cash to the Treasury. We're facing a how many trillion dollar deficit?
I'm not trying to substantiate or refute any theories. Having said that, if it is well known that the front door doesn't have a lock on it, then one day some enterprising individual or organization come along with a business plan along the lines of...
1. Lock front door 2. Charge for lock 3. ??? (completely unnecessary ??? step) 4. Profit
Given that scenario, the NSA still has their back door into the system.
Hackers are just like other people and they have egos too. Would you consider publishing something in Phrack bragging? How about speaking at Defcon, or Black Hat? The subject of the article did not even allow the journalist to use his real name, and there wasn't any mention of a handle. Where is the bragging?
Yes and Porsches are made by the same people who invaded France and killed the Jews. Luckily for the human race and society, people and groups change... often times for the better.
If it is such a PITA then they can use VirtualBox or any of a number of other virtualization solutions (VMware, etc.) There is no reason for a tech savvy company like Google to have IE6 anywhere near sensitive data or systems.
They demanded that Sun push high end servers (with their high sales commissions) instead of x86-64 solutions and, IMHO, effectively killed the company
How much of their failure in the x86-64 solution has to do with the fact that they were going up against two entrenched players (HP and Dell)? I wasn't even aware that Sun offered low end servers until I read about it in the WSJ this morning.
If this goes to trial and I were a lawyer for Microsoft, I would just produce a list of the number of users who were able to successfully download the product in question within a 48 hour window. There is a really good chance that number is >1. If what the article says is true and the plaintiff is whining about the entire download system as a whole, I'd just produce a list of the number of successful downloads in that same 48 hour period that frames the time the plaintiff is charging he had a problem in.
It seems like this guy is destined for failure.
I always thought the issue with Microsoft's Live service was the whole "point" scheme in the first place. I've read complaints about the system being setup in a way so that people are often left with a few extra points laying around. For example a game might cost 8 points. Microsoft will only sell points in increments of 5 or 10. FWIW - I'm not an Xbox360 owner. I bought a PS3, the system where every game is really $1 more expensive than the listed price because Sony tacks on an extra $1 to the price. It seems like no console is perfect these days.
Except for those exploits that target Acrobat, or Flash, or.. or.. or.
Microsoft has made some improvements with DEP and IE8 on Win7, but there are still far too many vulnerabilities in commonly used and widely distributed applications to make me comfortable with Windows.
It's all downhill from here. I wouldn't say that Google's endeavors beyond search have been complete failures. I wouldn't call them raging successes either. The time is coming in the next few years when people are going to take a long and hard look at Google's valuation and begin to ask, "Where is the value?"
For all of their side projects and initiatives and ideas, Google seems to be little more than the most successful (so far) advertising resource on the internet. It isn't hard to imagine Google holding onto their lead in search, and that will continue to generate revenue for them. Beyond that, what are they really going to do that justifies their $500+ per share stock price? Cellphones, netbooks, tablets? Google Apps?
There hasn't been anyone there to lead the charge. Organizing a union is a big undertaking. I used to handle the IT system for the MPEG. They have a staff of about 20 people. Too many nerds are "do it themselves" types. They won't give their "hard earned money" to someone else just so that someone else can "represent" them.
Moderation is key. Most of the injuries that I've seen people sustain happen when they are training with frequent intensity, and then they take a week or so off. After the time off, they come right back and try to train at the same intensity that they were at before they took the break. They make it through two or three days and then *pop*, something goes out or something gets pulled.
As numerous people have pointed out, the 50% figure was way off base. I was just eluding to the point that just because the Red Cross sends ## million dollars of aid to Haiti doesn't mean that the Haitian's are really getting anywhere close to the full 100% of those millions.
Administrative overhead isn't the only drain on a donation. There are huge logistical costs involved in just about any sort of relief effort. Sending $10 worth of food to a place like Haiti might end up costing $100 once you include administrative, logistical and other associated costs. Again before people freak out, I'm not trying to suggest that it really costs $100 to send $10 worth of supplies to Haiti. I have no idea what it costs. I do know that it isn't free.
264 characters in two minutes? That's individual characters... 264 individual characters? 264 key presses in 2 minutes? That's about two key presses a second. Big deal?
Yes there is a way to follow the money. I'm 95% certain that the Red Cross is still using Raisers Edge to track their fund raising. It's a trivial matter to generate a campaign report that details who gave the money and what fund it went to. As far as tracking it from the fund to actual recipient, I think you're going to find that it gets wasted in the same way most charitable donations get wasted. Well over 50% of the money gets consumed in administrative overhead.
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Apple has traditionally had two target markets. Those markets are education and "creative professionals". Creative professionals aren't going to turn out enterprise applications, but they can sure come up with some spiffy product literature. The education culture is focused on learning, not application development. In the past decade Apple has expanded their focus to include the consumer market.
Apple is so far behind the curve in the business market that they'd run themselves out of money trying to play catchup. They can't compete in the desktop space. I've heard that their X-Serve boxes are nice, but even in the SMB market they'd get clobbered by HP and Dell. They don't have anything close to what IBM and Oracle/Sun are putting out for enterprise customers. Beyond that, there aren't enough developers targeting the platform to develop the accounting packages, ERP systems, groupware servers, etc. that businesses run on.
Counter points... If someone else picked up your house and moved it to another lot, you'd want it back. If someone moved into your house and changed the locks on you, you'd want some sort of recourse. You probably don't own your house, the bank does. Even if you've paid off the mortgage, you still have to pay property taxes and maintenance (new roof, old plumbing, carpet, etc) If someone drove away with your car you would want it back.
When you buy a house or a car, are you buying it for yourself or are you buying it for the entire neighborhood? The problem with software is that one copy can be reproduced an infinite number of times. A company has a couple of choices. They can lock their software into their hardware like Apple does. Or they can try to find the economic sweet spot between affordability for the customer and profitability for the company. I spent my teens on BBSes downloading all the warez I could. Despite that when I found a game from a publisher that I liked, I would pay for it. I wanted the company to say in business so that they could make more games. I feel the same way about Windows. For all of its warts, the applications that make day to day life easier (and make it possible for the organization I work for to function efficiently) are Windows apps.
Your car analogy fails because you have to continually pay to keep it registered, even after you buy it. When you pay for your registration and insurance, you don't get "free" upgrades. The car just keeps getting older. On the positive side, the car pretty much just works right off of the lot. Software is a process of gradual improvement.
Having said all of that, I think that Microsoft is fighting a losing battle. The OS itself is quickly becoming obsolete. Applications are moving away from the desktop and onto the web on the front end. On the back end, developers are finding alternative platforms to develop for. Sooner or later we are going to reach the point where a "good enough" solution is provided outside of the Windows ecosystem.
Windows continues to thrive because of the applications available exclusively on the platform. Even so, those applications are being virtualized on both the desktop (think Parallels, VirtualBox, et al) and on the server (Citrix, Terminal Services, etc.) Again, the OS becomes less relevant. If I were an app developer, I'd be scared to death of developing something for Microsoft SQL Server because of the fear that someone else would develop a similar product targeting MySQL or Progres running on Linux. It would be impossible to compete on cost and it would be unfair to my clients to expect them to eat Windows licensing fees on top of whatever I wanted to charge them for my app.
I like Windows because for me it just works. I realize I'm probably in the minority, and that's why I get paid to come to work five days a week and make sure that it "just works" for close to 200 other people. As a consultant I was responsible for thousands of Windows boxes and servers for organizations that reached across the globe. I've setup Linux servers and after hours of tweaking and configuring, they continue to just work. I've worked with OSX, and it just works... until you use some none Apple software (Adobe, I'm looking at you). Like everyone else on here, I've grown up with technology. It's my experience that in this day and age, the only thing that comes close to just working is my game console (PS3). It even phones home for new firmware from time to time.
The likely scenario is more along the lines of: US military raids al Qaeda safe house in Pakistan and recovers laptops. Laptops are protected by TPM chips. Owner of authentication mechanism (making the assumption it isn't a thumb print) refuses to divulge the information. Laptop is sent back to CIA station and the chip is physically cracked.
As others have mentioned, the chip is just one layer of defense. Odds are that the hard drive itself will be encrypted and that's a whole other nut to crack.
Here's the unanswered question in my mind. The original hack required serious physical manipulation of the chip. What about the chip design precludes developing a TPM compatible chip that disables the protections?
The only hardware hacking that I've ever been privy to involved the Oki 900 cellphone in the mid-90s. Obvious the Oki EPROM and the TPM chip are different beasts. Having said that, when hacking the Oki the EPROM was replaced with one that enhanced code in addition to the base code from the factory.
Given that the internals of the TPM chip have been pried open and can be observed in real time, how long until replacement chips are available that disable the protections, but make it appear that those protections are in place?
Look for Google and T-Mobile to start offering discounted Nexus One phones in heavily Arabic communities. ;)
This seems like something that the NSA is probably salivating over. Imagine being able to translate intercepts in near real time with accurate voice recognition. I'm sure they already have imagined it. That technology is nothing short of a Manhattan Project for the SIGINT community.
In my mind it is the scope of reward that is evil and wrong. In the article, it is mentioned that one of the Sun executives is getting a severance package worth $175 MILLION dollars. That compensation package is enough to pay 1750 employees $100,000 for a year. Those 1750 imaginary employees who would be making that $100,000 are employees who are doing the jobs given to them by senior management. For all intents and purposes, those people are probably doing their jobs competently. Despite the fact that they are competent at their job, they are getting laid off.
People who are competent get laid off. The person responsibility for the health of the company gets enough money that he could pay 1749 other people a significant amount of money, even though he completely failed to keep the company going.
As the blog post mentions, the problem is fiduciary responsibility and the fact that in many cases (including Sun), the major share holders are also the executives themselves. So the CEO, CFO, Chairman of the Board and the rest of the executives set things up so that even in failing, they increased their stock value 42%. Thousands of employees lose their jobs, but those guys at the top get hundreds of millions of dollars among them.
There is a saying that "There is no greater sin than not knowing when you have enough." Corporate America is out of wack. The guys at the top fail so seriously that their companies go bankrupt. Despite that, they get millions of dollars. Employees who do their jobs don't get millions of dollars, and when the company fails they get assed out.
The "evil" that you don't understand is the rewarding of failure that leads to the suffering of others.
To make it easier to understand and to make a more basic explanation, lets replace "money" with "food". Lets say that the executive in charge of Sun has a machine that makes food for thousands of people. He runs the machine so poorly that it breaks down, and thousands of people no longer have access to the food it provides. In the process of breaking the machine, he manages to engineer it so that the very last time he runs the machine, it makes enough food to feed him, his family and his friends' families for a couple hundred years if they manage the food he created properly.
If there weren't laws in place to protect the asshole running the machine, the masses would tear him apart and divvy up the food he set aside for himself. Since there are laws in place, the asshole gets labeled "evil and wrong".
If there were justice in the world, or if the person running the machine were moral, he'd divvy up the remains equally among the tribe who helped him run the machine. There isn't justice in the world, and the man running the machine isn't moral. He took the lions share of what the machine produced and left everyone else out in the cold.
Two things your logic misses. First you've completely ignored the fact that the profits from drugs are used to finance the war. It isn't just the Taliban who are trading dope for military hardware. The drug trade is a perfect way for the government and companies to launder money. Here is a link to a PBS article that details a small, ACKNOWLEDGED portion of the process.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/drugs/special/us.html
The PBS article talks about legit goods like appliances and automobiles. The arms market is a whole other beast. The CIA and other agencies use drugs to fund operations that they can't go to Congress for.
Here's an article about how the CIA was involved in running drugs through Arkansas.
http://www.serendipity.li/cia/hayes2.html
The other thing that I think you should consider is that the farmers need an alternate crop. As others have stated, there isn't much that will grown in Afghanistan. They could grow hemp though. In my mind, and I've said it before, it would be great to switch them from opium to hemp. Opium has one use. It is a pain killer. Hemp has multiple uses. The way I conceived of it working, the UN or US or whoever would buy the opium for a few years while the transition takes place. Once the farmers start growing hemp, they could sell to local markets in the provincial capitols. The capitols could start to build infrastructure to use the hemp. Hemp can be turned into cloth for clothing. The oil can be used for cooking and heating. The farmers could be allowed to grow marijuana too. It's about time that people pull their heads of their asses regarding marijuana prohibition. It isn't the best substance in world for your body, but it isn't any worse than cigarettes or alcohol. The added benefit of hemp is that it encourages companion industries like textiles.
I submitted the story three years ago but it never got picked up.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9046424/Update_Maxtor_drives_contain_password_stealing_Trojans?intsrc=hm_list
In short, Maxtor drives that were produced in Taiwan contained trojan source code that phone home to two servers located in China. There wasn't any conclusive evidence to tie the incident directly to the Chinese (wink wink, nudge nudge).
If I have a paper book and I think a friend of mine will enjoy it, I can hand the book off to them when they are done. If they have a friend who will enjoy it, they can pass it along, etc. With a paper book, once I'm done with it I can take it to a used book store and they will give me a small amount toward the purchase of another book.
eBooks completely destroy the second hand book market. A paper book has some intrinsic value to others beyond the original purchaser. In my mind, that alone makes it worth ~$15+ (hard cover).
Anyone who is willing to pay a similar amount for an eBook as they would pay for a physical book isn't very smart.
It looks like eBooks are looking to make a big push into the classroom. Textbooks are already ridiculously expensive. Does anything think that electronic textbooks are going to be any less expensive? What will happen to the large number of students who are currently buying used text books? That entire market disappears.
I wonder what the NSA's hourly rate is. Surely Google is going to be paying them, right? If the spooks are being paid by tax dollars and working for the public sector there is something shady going on there. I'm all for the NSA and Google working together to make Google a more profitable comapany... Wait, no I'm not! Given Google's current stock valuation, they can go right ahead and kick down some cash to the Treasury. We're facing a how many trillion dollar deficit?
I'm not trying to substantiate or refute any theories. Having said that, if it is well known that the front door doesn't have a lock on it, then one day some enterprising individual or organization come along with a business plan along the lines of...
1. Lock front door
2. Charge for lock
3. ??? (completely unnecessary ??? step)
4. Profit
Given that scenario, the NSA still has their back door into the system.
Hackers are just like other people and they have egos too. Would you consider publishing something in Phrack bragging? How about speaking at Defcon, or Black Hat? The subject of the article did not even allow the journalist to use his real name, and there wasn't any mention of a handle. Where is the bragging?
Yes and Porsches are made by the same people who invaded France and killed the Jews. Luckily for the human race and society, people and groups change... often times for the better.
If it is such a PITA then they can use VirtualBox or any of a number of other virtualization solutions (VMware, etc.) There is no reason for a tech savvy company like Google to have IE6 anywhere near sensitive data or systems.
They demanded that Sun push high end servers (with their high sales commissions) instead of x86-64 solutions and, IMHO, effectively killed the company
How much of their failure in the x86-64 solution has to do with the fact that they were going up against two entrenched players (HP and Dell)? I wasn't even aware that Sun offered low end servers until I read about it in the WSJ this morning.
If this goes to trial and I were a lawyer for Microsoft, I would just produce a list of the number of users who were able to successfully download the product in question within a 48 hour window. There is a really good chance that number is >1. If what the article says is true and the plaintiff is whining about the entire download system as a whole, I'd just produce a list of the number of successful downloads in that same 48 hour period that frames the time the plaintiff is charging he had a problem in.
It seems like this guy is destined for failure.
I always thought the issue with Microsoft's Live service was the whole "point" scheme in the first place. I've read complaints about the system being setup in a way so that people are often left with a few extra points laying around. For example a game might cost 8 points. Microsoft will only sell points in increments of 5 or 10. FWIW - I'm not an Xbox360 owner. I bought a PS3, the system where every game is really $1 more expensive than the listed price because Sony tacks on an extra $1 to the price. It seems like no console is perfect these days.
Except for those exploits that target Acrobat, or Flash, or .. or .. or.
Microsoft has made some improvements with DEP and IE8 on Win7, but there are still far too many vulnerabilities in commonly used and widely distributed applications to make me comfortable with Windows.
It's all downhill from here. I wouldn't say that Google's endeavors beyond search have been complete failures. I wouldn't call them raging successes either. The time is coming in the next few years when people are going to take a long and hard look at Google's valuation and begin to ask, "Where is the value?"
For all of their side projects and initiatives and ideas, Google seems to be little more than the most successful (so far) advertising resource on the internet. It isn't hard to imagine Google holding onto their lead in search, and that will continue to generate revenue for them. Beyond that, what are they really going to do that justifies their $500+ per share stock price? Cellphones, netbooks, tablets? Google Apps?
There hasn't been anyone there to lead the charge. Organizing a union is a big undertaking. I used to handle the IT system for the MPEG. They have a staff of about 20 people. Too many nerds are "do it themselves" types. They won't give their "hard earned money" to someone else just so that someone else can "represent" them.
Moderation is key. Most of the injuries that I've seen people sustain happen when they are training with frequent intensity, and then they take a week or so off. After the time off, they come right back and try to train at the same intensity that they were at before they took the break. They make it through two or three days and then *pop*, something goes out or something gets pulled.
As numerous people have pointed out, the 50% figure was way off base. I was just eluding to the point that just because the Red Cross sends ## million dollars of aid to Haiti doesn't mean that the Haitian's are really getting anywhere close to the full 100% of those millions.
Administrative overhead isn't the only drain on a donation. There are huge logistical costs involved in just about any sort of relief effort. Sending $10 worth of food to a place like Haiti might end up costing $100 once you include administrative, logistical and other associated costs. Again before people freak out, I'm not trying to suggest that it really costs $100 to send $10 worth of supplies to Haiti. I have no idea what it costs. I do know that it isn't free.
How do you contact such a person, yo ask? Post your resume on Monster with the right keywords (provided, of course, that you have the skills!).
I've had better luck with Dice. I get at least a call or two per month from recruiters.
264 characters in two minutes? That's individual characters... 264 individual characters? 264 key presses in 2 minutes? That's about two key presses a second. Big deal?
Yes there is a way to follow the money. I'm 95% certain that the Red Cross is still using Raisers Edge to track their fund raising. It's a trivial matter to generate a campaign report that details who gave the money and what fund it went to. As far as tracking it from the fund to actual recipient, I think you're going to find that it gets wasted in the same way most charitable donations get wasted. Well over 50% of the money gets consumed in administrative overhead.