"We've been doubling sales every 18 months. However, when you start from zero, it takes a long while."
— Stephen Yeo, a marketing director at Windows-terminal manufacturer Wyse, explaining his company's less-than-meteoric rise, to ZDNet UK
From Business 2.0's 101 dumbest moments in business.
They are trying to collect pictures at every whole degree intersection of latitude and longitude. It would be an interesting complement to the satellite/aerial picture databases already available on the internet.
Here's the company site:
Here's the thread on Slashdot from March 20:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/0
Unfortunately, all the company is saying about the key-stroke detection technology is:
VKB has developed a detection method through several proprietary developments for the accurate and reliable detection of user interaction … VKB has filed numerous patents on its core technology and related applications.
I suppose you could go find their patent applications…
The U.S. House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property has requested public comment on digital music & copyright issues. This request for comments is part of the Subcommittee's ongoing process of reviewing proposals and amendments concerning copyright in the digital environment. For more details, see http://www.eff.org/alerts/20020329_eff_
I just sent this email:
Dear Chairman Coble and Members of the Subcommittee:
The current DMCA is too restrictive at the expense of fair-use rights; please don't ignore those rights. While copyright violations may be an issue, the DMCA is much too powerful a law for the scale of the problems. With the DMCA, content authors could prevent me from making backups. If I buy a new computer the DMCA could allow authors to prevent me from transferring the media to my new computer. If I'm done with a song (or book or…) in digital form, the DMCA would allow authors to prevent me from loaning the song to my brother.
Many proponents of DMCA argue that they would never go to such draconian measures. But as long as the law exists, what happens if they change their mind next year?
Proponents also argue that DMCA does not prevent me from sharing the music, just copying it. But the problem is that the DMCA allows authors to create systems where the music (or book or …) will only work with a specific player (hardware). This is more like saying I can share a CD, but only if my brother comes to my house to listen to the CD. Or even more silly, if I give my house to my brother so he can listen to the CD. With the DCMA, I might have to give my entire player to my brother just so he could listen to one song. This is ridiculous.
In closing, the penalties and effects of laws should be in proportion to the risk and effects of the behavior the law is trying to regulate. Consider this: In the U.S. it's legal to own a guns and knives, but it is illegal (thanks to the DMCA) to own software that "could be used to circumvent copy protection. How can misuse of software be that much worse than misuse of guns and knives so that we need to make software completely illegal? Furthermore, the software that might circumvent copy protection (such as making backups) is just as useful as knives (for cutting vegetables), yet the DMCA ignores this usefulness.
The DMCA is completely out of proportion to the problems it is purported to solve.
Sincerely,
"The thing that will really improve software is when someone figures out how to establish a [more] direct link between the risks of using a product and the creation of the product. The software industry seems to think the tobacco industry business model is a good one. It's okay to kill your customers, there will always be a new one to replace the one you just lost."
— Scott James, as seen in the 15 March 2002 issue of Crypto-Gram
Richard Clarke, on software security and the incentives (or lack of) that businesses respond to:
If you want to fix network security, hack the business model.
He advocates tweaking laws/regulations such that the incentives change so that business will automatically create better software. As seen in the 15 March 2002 issue of Crypto-Gram.
In Robert X. Cringely's 14 March 2002 column, he mentions the programs that are available that will wipe your browser's history file and cache so that other's can't see what you've been surfing. He goes on:
The only problem with those programs is they leave a squeaky clean system that makes you look to the boss like you are hiding something, whether you are or not. So rather than delete files and caches, my idea would be to REPLACE them. You could start www.cleancache.com and have there sample history files and caches ready for downloading. Just choose a profile — little kid, history professor, java programmer, soccer mom — and actual content from actual people would be downloaded, replacing your surfing identity with theirs.
http://softwaredev.earthweb.com/sdtech/a
By Charles Connell
Everyone wants programmers to be productive. Managers of programmers want maximum productivity — it gets the work done faster and makes the managers look good. All other things being equal, programmers like being productive. They can get home earlier, reduce stress during the workday, and feel better about their finished products. Programming productivity is even in each country's national interest, since it advances the country's position in the worldwide software industry.
Unfortunately, the standard definitions of software productivity are incorrect. They miss the essence of software development. This article examines some of the usual definitions for programmer productivity, shows why they are wrong, and then proposes an alternate definition that accurately captures what programming is really about.
As reported in various media (CNet, Wired, etc) there is a new sport called "googlewhacking" where you try to use Google to find exactly one web page that has a pair of words. If more than one page matches, or no pages matches, the pair of words does not count.
For some examples, see http://www.googlewhack.com/tally.pl
Hmm, now that I think about it, you can also cheat if you're patient enough. If you find a pair of words that get zero hits. Create a web page (maybe an anonymous slashdot post) that contains the pair of words, wait for google to find it, then you "win". But I'm sure that any judges would get suspicious if they could trace the page back to you, or if the page did not use words in a "reasonable" way.
"We reject kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code."
— attributed to Dave Clark regarding software design